Short Answer - It depends.


The removable drives that are supplied by the Lancashire Teaching Hospitals IT Service Desk can be used on our PCs in the training rooms and allow you to save, edit and delete the data on them. The older drives that contained the Efar SafeStick software (from which the Trust's nickname originates) and are no longer officially supported by IT, though they have been known to still run on Trust PCs. The newer drives are 4GB SanDisk Cruzer  Blade drives modified with a copy of Lumension Disk Encryption and tracked by the Lumension Endpoint Security suite installed on all of the Trust PCs. 


Once inserted, you'll need to enter a password to unlock the drive before you can do anything with it. This box should pop up automatically on our Windows 7 PCs. If for whatever reason it doesn't you can access it by going to Computer in Windows Explorer (folder icon on the taskbar) or by clicking the start button and selecting it in the column on the right.


You will have 5 attempts to enter the password correctly each time before the drive becomes permanently locked. These attempts are saved so unplugging or changing computers will not reset this. Should you run into an issue or forget your password, please contact the IT Service Desk by email or dialling (01772 52) 2185.


Unfortunately due to the nature of how Lumension works these drives aren't usable on MacOS/OSX or Linux based computers.



Drives from other NHS Trusts and organisations may be secured in a similar fashion often use different technology and drivers which are often blocked by Lumension Endpoint Security, so these drives cannot be used on a Trust PC here.