[H-GEN] can you partition USB drives?

[Troy Piggins]

* Russell Stuart is quoted & my replies are inline below :
> On Thu, 2008-05-29 at 10:34 +1000, Troy Piggins wrote:
>> 
>> 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.

G'day Russell.

Thanks for that.

> 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.

Thanks again.

-- 
Troy Piggins | http://piggo.com/~troy                           
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