Windows 7: Lock Computer With USB Drive

First off, I am glad to finally join the forums. I have been reading/learning from this site for a while but I now have a question that needs help.

I know in older versions of Windows you can copy the boot.ini (as well as other files) to a USB Drive which does not allow the computer to boot without the USB Drive in the computer. From a little research it appears that Windows 7 does not have a boot.ini file.



Is there anyway I would be able to perform the task of requiring my USB Drive to be in place to boot my laptop? If there is no way to do this simply with files could someone recommend a program which will do the same?

Thanks
-TurboMaLuM

Hello Turbomalum, and welcome to Seven Forums.

If you have Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise, then you can use BitLocker with a USB flash drive to only be able to startup your computer with the USB flash drive connected.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

hi Brink!

can you elaborate on the procedure for doing this?

never mind, i COMPLETELY missed the link you had in your post......DOH!

LOL, no problem Bushman.

all righty, followed Brinks tutorial, zero issues, easy to do!

however, right now the drive is encrypting, and it shows a red bar and only 6GB free (out of 500GB. Previously i had 275Gb free prior to setting up Bitlocker with USB lock.

thoughts on the red bar and only 6GB free?

screen shot coming

Hello Bushman,

Not sure why your hard drive filled up like that. You might run Disk Cleanup, or the free program CCleaner, to see what they come up with.

here is screenshots from CCleaner , CCleaner-registry + Defraggler. I defragged the system drive this morning , prior to running the Bitlocker/usb lock tutorial.....The system drive filled up instantly as soon as i started encrypting it with bitlocker

doesn't seem to be affecting anything (yet) i played COD modern warfare 2 all morning, while running GIMP photo render and encrypting the drive in the background........

BTW great tutorial, easy to follow!

What you are seeing is Bitlocker encrypting the drive. It basicly has to move data from it's current location to the unencrypted portion of the drive then encrypts those sectors and moves the data back to the encrypted portion of the drive. Once the drive is fully encrypted it will return to normal and the red will go away.