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WinCleaner dongle


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On impulse this past summer, I bought a WinCleaner dongle at my local dollar store. It looks like a swivel thumb drive.

It claims to support XP through 8.1, so I fearlessly plugged it into my 98se machine hoping to be able to reformat it. It is recognized as an external CD-ROM drive containing a finalized read-only disc.

Discussion here with photos suggests it may be just an 8-pin ROM chip and a USB interface chip. There also appears to be a second 8-pad chip location vacant.

Any ideas for further analysis or repurposing of the hardware? I'm good with a soldering iron!

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Well, it's seemingly not a "dongle" it's just a "normal" USB stick, made out of a controller and a flash memory (possibly with very little capacity).

Most "normal" USB sticks have controllers capable of making two LUN's (if you remember the good ol'SCSI days), one a CD-Rom like device and the second a "hard disk like device", and of course just the first (your case) or just the second (like 99.99% of USB sticks you can find).

You don't need a soldering iron at all, you need to identify the controller make/model AND find the corresponding suitable "Manufacturer's Tool" (which may or may not be available).

A good starting point is (Russian, but not bad at all through Google Translate):

http://www.usbdev.ru/

jaclaz

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