[H-GEN] can you partition USB drives?

[Russell Stuart]

On Thu, 2008-05-29 at 10:34 +1000, Troy Piggins wrote:
> [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
> [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
> 
> G'day all.  Been pretty quiet in this list of late.
> 
> I was considering installing some portable apps on a USB drive
> (like Putty, gVim etc) that are Windows based, but then was also
> thinking about installing Damn Small Linux on the same USB drive.
> Is that possible to do?  Can you partition them like hard disks,
> giving each one a different filesystem?  Never really owned one
> and not sure how the filesystems are handled.

Yes, it works (as in I have done it).  DSL actually 
supplies a set of scripts to make a bootable USB 
flash drive version.

And yes you can partition them - just like a normal 
HDD.  The are not always partitioned though, meaning 
that if the USB flash device is /dev/sdb, then the 
fat file system was written to /dev/sdb using 
msdosfs /dev/sdb, instead of doing something like 
fdisk /dev/sdb, mkdosfs /dev/sdb1.

However, the end result is flaky, as in the USB flash 
drive won't boot on all hardware.  Its a bit like the 
first bootable CDROM's in that way.  Booting off a 
CDROM was an iffy proposition for a while.  The problem 
went away when MS released their OS's on bootable CD's, 
so in order to be able to install Windows you had to be 
able to boot off a CD.  This caused the hardware vendors 
to get their act together fairly quickly.  USB has not 
been the same transition, unfortunately.