So, what did we get in the end? Click the Infineon icon in the system tray, type in the password and you get access to your secret disk with not much on it yet.

However, you can start adding your secret data there right away.

The secret drive looks like a regular drive:

The disk manager doesn’t see it though, because in reality it is an encrypted file of the size we set for our secret drive. It is located in that logical HDD partition that we set for it.

When we no longer need access to our secret data, we click the Infineon icon in the tray and disconnect our secret drive. If the drive is still in use at the time we will get a warning:

Simple, isn’t it? Yes, it is! But a little boring to my taste… But even in this case Gigabyte Ultra TPM utility will help. Instead of entering your password every time (you can save it, but then there will be nothing secret about the whole thing anymore), the utility will offer you to save a key onto a USB flash drive. And not just one key, but at least two. It may have something to do with the data security. Flash drives can often break. If it happens and there won’t be any backup copy anywhere, the data stored on your secret drive will be lost for good: the encryption algorithms they use a very reliable.

Once you have selected the flash drives to save your keys on, enter your password:

And you are done!

Now it is even easier and much more fun to use this secret drive. It even adds some James Bond feel to the whole thing. Just connect one of the flash drives to the PC and your secret drive will be automatically activated.

You remove the flash drive and walk away from the system, and the drive is no longer available. Very fun.

It doesn’t affect the contents of your USB Flash Drives. There will only appear two small additional files. However, it is important to remember: if it used to be a boot-up flash drive, it will no longer be able to function as such. I have to admit that I wasted quite a few nerve cells trying to figure out why my home system would hand during POST when I tried to boot from a flash drive that has never caused any problems. When I connected this flash drive to Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6, the system would pass POST flawlessly, but then it would keep asking for some kind of password…

Looks like Gigabyte Ultra TPM Utility does something else when saving the key to a flash drive. Luckily, once you understand what the problem is, it can be very easily fixed. After creating the key save the two news files in some TMP folder, format the flash drive, make it a boot-up device again and then move the files back to it. As a result, it will be able to provide access to your secret drive without losing its boot-up functionality.

The important thing is that the keys are created individually for each of the two flash drives, so don’t mix them up when copying the keys. That is why you can let anyone use your flash drive with the key. Even if they copy it to a different flash drive, they will not be able to access your secret drive.

We can think of numerous useful applications for this secret drive. However, if you feel that this simplified configuration doesn’t give you everything you need, you can always switch from Gigabyte Ultra TPM Utility back to the full configuration of Infineon Security Platform.