can I USB install with partition size

Forum: USB booting
Topic: can I USB install with partition size
started by: stevodude

Posted by stevodude on Feb. 27 2006,22:46

as title says, and I may be jumping the gun a bit here, as I am just downloading dsl now, but...

If I make a DSL ISO CD, boot from it, then run the usbhdd install menu item, can I select the size of the DSL install partition? as from what I can gather within these forums is that it will wipe your whole USB stick?

It's just that I have a 1Gb usb, and I want to create a DSL boot with 250Mb or so, and a second boot with UBCD ( takes about 180Mb) then the rest as data storage ( around 500Mb).

is this possible? or failing that, a 250Mb DSL partition and a 750Mb data partition (fat32 for example). does the usbhdd install format the usb stick as ext2 or something else?.

sorry if these have been answered before, but I spent about 1/2 hr troling through the the forum for an answer.

currently the usb stick is blank with 1Gb fat32.

cheers, stevo.

Posted by cbagger01 on Mar. 01 2006,06:02

The USBHDD installation will blow away all partitions and then create a single new FAT partition that is the size of your USB device. It then formats the partition and copies the files from the ISO. Finally, it installs the SYSLINUX boot loader to make the USB device a "bootable" device.

You can probably accomplish your goals by manually installing it yourself. Just DON'T use the USBHDD script to do it.

When running from livecd, the USB device behaves just like a normal SCSI hard drive does. It is usually located at device /dev/sda

You can manually run partitioning utilities like

sudo su
cfdisk /dev/sda

to partition it and you can also format a partition like a regular hard drive:

sudo su
mkfs -t ext2 /dev/sda1

for example.

As long as you have a bootloader installed, DSL can be booted from either partition and the DSL files can be stores in an EXT2, FAT, or FAT32 partition. The names are case sensitive, so if copying files to a FAT or FAT32 partition, make sure to use all uppercase letters for the file names.

Keep in mind that MSWindows will only detect and mount the FIRST data partition, so you want to make sure that your FAT or FAT32 "leftover generic storage" partition is the FIRST one and not the 2nd or 3rd.

Hope this helps.

Good Luck.

Posted by vnb_tom on Mar. 01 2006,11:16

hi,
have u partitoned and got the result.plz tel and also sugest me any ideas.
I too had a 1 gb pen drive and i tried it to partition it using the format utility given along with the drive for the same purpose and finally it collapsed every thing in the drive.Now i have applied it for the warranty.Currently, i have fear to try partition my other drive which is also 1 gb.