[H-GEN] can you partition USB drives?

Troy Piggins troy at piggo.com
Wed May 28 21:58:01 EDT 2008


* Karl. is quoted & my replies are inline below :
> On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 10:34:15AM +1000, Troy Piggins wrote:
> 
>> 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?
> 
> Under linux, no problem - they can be partitioned just like a normal 
> hard drive.
> 
> Under windows, it's more complicated.
> - USB flash drives have the 'removable' bit set, and windows will refuse  
>   to recognise extra partitions on them (but first partition works 
>   fine).  
>   
> - USB hard drives work just like normal - partition as much as you like.  
>   Windows will kindly offer to reformat non-FAT/non-NTFS partitions for 
>   you, if you try to access them.  (although you can install an ext2/3 
>   driver so that windows can access those partitions)

Thanks for that.  I'll do it all with linux fdisk.

> My main USB flash drive has 3 partitions 
> - 1st is FAT (with Damn Small Linux and various other things installed, 
>   including portable apps)

I'm interested in how you set this up.  So you plugged your USB
stick into a linux box and created 3 partitions with the first being
FAT, then installed DSL onto it?  Where have you installed the
portable apps?  Just in the root dir of the DSL installation?  So
this first partition looks like this:

/etc
/home
/usr
/var
...
/putty-portable
/gvim-portable
...

And those xx-portable dirs are the ones that contain Windows
binaries?

If that's the case, then I probably don't need the other
partitions after all.  I was just thinking about having a FAT
partition with the portable apps on it, and an EXT3 partition
with DSL on it.  Never installed linux on a FAT partition before
:)

> - 2nd is ext2
> - 3rd is encrypted ext2
> 
> It all works as it should under linux, but windows only ever sees the 
> first partition and appears to be completely ignorant about the rest.  

Thanks for your thoughts.

-- 
Troy Piggins | http://piggo.com/~troy                           
RLU#415538                                                      ,-O   (o-    O  
                                                               O   )  //\     O 
                                                                `-O   V_/_  OOO




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