Friday 11 January 2008

Windows Vista - Kingston DTSP Data Traveler Error: Requires Two Free Drive Letters

Having recently placed our first Windows Vista client into one of our accounting firm clients, we are discovering all sorts of interesting hiccups.

One hiccup is with the Kingston DataTraveler Secure - Privacy Edition. Every member of the firm is required to use this device when carrying around client data.

This keeps the client data protected by a strict password and hardware encryption.

On Windows XP Professional, the flash drive works really well. On Windows Vista however, the security software stalls.

Essentially there are two partitions on the flash drive: One that mimics a CDROM and spools up the software to access the second partition that is hardware encrypted.

Even if we allow the software on the "CD" partition to run when prompted by Windows Vista, it stalls.

It turns out that there is a Kingston support entry for this problem on Windows Vista: Issue: KTP-012210-3 After inserting the DTSP into a Windows Vista computer, I received an error stating, "DTSecure Privacy requires two free drive letters.".

To resolve the error, we need to update the firmware on the DataTreveler. We contacted Kingston's Technical Support and were directed to a password protected FTP site with the appropriate firmware update.

Note that the firmware update will format the encrypted partition, so make sure that no data resides on the DataTreveler before updating it.

Once the firmware was updated, we needed to run through the setup routine to set the access password and user information to the flash drive.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

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