USB booting :: Partitionining / reformating USB drive



Hey all, the other day i tried to install dsl to my usb drive, its a U3  1 Gig Geeksquad jump drive, i noticed when id id it created a new partition i was fine with that, however now when i plug in my usb drive all i have is that one 50mb partition and 960mb unpartitioned space that i can seem to partition with windows Disk manager....

any ideas of how to either delete the one partition or create an extended one?

thanks...

edit:  well i was able to reformat with Hp's USB reformating Tool, however now i just have one big partition, id still like to be able to say have 2 partitions, one with DSL on it, and the 2nd for sotring documents and data in windows. is this even possible?
read sumwhere on the forums that i might be able to format using QTparted which sounds like its a linux version of partition magic... i tried to install it while in dsl, but couldnt get it to work...

Try doing a USBHDD installation.

It creates a single partition that is usable by both Windows and DSL

True, but the partition it creates is only 50 Mbs, leaving ya (in my case) with 940MB of unpartitioned space that windows cant use....

with QTparted ive tried to hide the DSL partition of the usb drive while making the 940mb partition of Fat16 Active, however everytime i go to see if it really worked in windows, it just comes up as a 50mb jump drive with 940 unpartitioned space....

Any ideas anyone? i just want to be able to have one partition so i can boot  up DSL, and another so i may save data while in windows.... is this even possible?

Have you tried cfdisk?  You can boot up DSLwith the USB key plugged in, open up bash terminal screen as su and type:

cfdisk /dev/sda  

This should tell you the size and types of partitions on the USB key and allow you to create or delete partitions of different types.  After creating the partitions, then you have to format them so they will be usable.

I hope this will help.

FYI, and maybe this should be put in the FAQ:
FAT16 can make and use partitions up to 2GB, and can use partitions that are less than 512MB. FAT32 can make partitions that are more than 2GB, but not less than 512. So don't try to make a 512MB or smaller partition on a Pen Drive using FAT32.

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