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For one of my course's midterm lab portion, the professor provided us flash drives to put our project in. Everyone had their named labeled on one, so she gave me the last one left out, which had a name that I was not able to find in our school's e-mail list. My AV asks scans any USB drives that get inserted into my laptop, and when I inserted the flash drive into my laptop, it scanned twice. I was wondering why till I went to my "Computer" screen, where it shows all the drives. I saw that there was a removable drive (The flash drive), as well as a Floppy Disk drive. The thing is, my laptop doesn't have a floppy disk drive. When I right clicked to safely remove the drive, I noticed the flash drive had a submenu, which showed another flash drive.

I ran a quick scan on my laptop afterwards, and nothing came up. Could this have anything to do with BadUSB? I'm running Windows 7; is there anything you guys suggest I do?

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If the USB sticks are second-hand, it is possible that you obtained a wiped one that used to have encryption software. They would frequently have two partitions, an unencrypted one to handle the authentication, and once you were authenticated, the software would mount the encrypted partition for use. USB Devices are also serial-bus, so you can have multiple devices plugged into one port at the same time. (Beautiful isn't it?)

First thing, if you were worried about sticking the thing in your computer to begin with, I wouldn't have done it. (It's actually kind of insensitive/rude for the professor to hand out USB sticks that could be infected with malware to all of the students just for his/her convenience...) Since we're past that stage, here are some options you can take: Format the bugger. Just wipe it clean and all will be forgiven. You can also try to use the Windows Disk Management software (or FDISK in the command-line) to re-partition the drives together, but that may not work if they are both genuinely different devices stuffed into the stick.

Enjoy your project!

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  • They were her flash drives, but I'm assuming every semester, she assigns them to students to put their code in there. The student could have done something t the flash drive, which was what I was worried about. I think the encryption software is a more plausible explanation. I will ask her tomorrow for the flash drive brand, and look up if it has encryption software. I do appreciate learning about the serial-bus functionality, as I never knew about it. – Abdul Oct 21 '14 at 21:51
  • @Abdul, small point, but the encryption software used has nothing to do with the brand of drive. The user could have created an encrypted partition using software like Truecrypt on any drive, regardless of who made it or if they have branded encryption software available. – Chris Murray Oct 22 '14 at 9:38

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