USB booting :: usb drive problems

I have installed DSL on a 1gb flash drive (zip-flash)
it has created a 50mb partition which appears to be fine
however my machine trys to boot from it and locks at the syslinux prompt

When i view the drive from windows I see two partitions
1 at 50mb and the other at 127Gb !

DSL seems to have left the drive in a state where i cannot access the other partition from windows and windows thinks its 127Gb and refuses to partition it.

As it stands im left with a 1gb usb drive with only 50mb useable

I have tried a few utils to repartition the disk - none were sucessful

1: Partition Magic - does not recongise the flash drive
2: Swissknife
3: kildisk from killdisk.com

None were able to sort it out.
Has anyone else seen this problem and know of a solution/workaround?

Ideally I want to have a boot USB DSL with embeded DSL there too and the rest of the space available for both windows and dsl

Boot DSL from livecd.

Open a terminal window and type:

dmesg | grep scsi -A 3

Find the device name for your USB disk, it is usually "sda" or "sdb". In this example, it is "sda". So we erase the drive and then repartition it manually. You then type:

sudo su
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
cfdisk /dev/sda

and then create a new FAT or FAT16 partition #1.

Finally, format the partition with:

mkdosfs /dev/sda1
sync

And then you should have a "normal" USB drive again for MSWindows.

TRied all of the above ... the dd command above did not finish - despite me waiting 10+ hours - the led on the drive was on continuously

I killed the command and now the drive is not recognised by cfdisk at all

cfdisk /dev/sda gives a FATAL error
similarly the
dd command now fails with "no space on device" if it try it now ...

in windows the drive is reported as 'generic' with no size and cant be formatted or partitioned....

looks like this is a dead usb drive

This is a long shot... Does the HP formatting tool (in windows) still work?

(If you are not familiar with it, it works with any brand key, as far as I can tell.)

I've also heard of people saving their drives with it in similar situations.

http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/hpcpqdt/us/download/20306.html

Hope that helps!

Quote (Guest @ Dec. 26 2005,10:18)

nope - i tried that too (thanks anyway) - along with every other tool i could find -
looks well and truly dead

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