Partitionning my usb pendrive

Forum: USB booting
Topic: Partitionning my usb pendrive
started by: joeam

Posted by joeam on Mar. 29 2006,18:48

I want to split my usb device into 2 partitions, 1 containing DSL (let's say sda1), and from which the system boots if i wanna boot from usb, and another partition that windows can read(sda2), where i can files that has nothing to do with dsl, so basicly windows will read sda2.

Any help is highly appreciated,
Thanks in advance,
Joe.

Posted by GôTô on Mar. 30 2006,12:19

Hmmm.. Did you have problems or did you not try yet ? I think you can partition your key like any other drive. Personnally, I use the program ''parted'' (apt-get install parted), simple and efficient (one terminal for the program, one for the man, and no problemo

)

Posted by joeam on Mar. 30 2006,14:38

i tried, i made a patition of 55 megs (for dsl) and another one for my files, i had 2 problems,
The utitlity to install dsl on pendrive wouldn't let me install on sda2 or sda1 it takes the whole sda.
2nd problem is that windows is reading the 55 mesgs partition.

Posted by green on Mar. 30 2006,15:08

my limited experience with partitioning USB thingys and them using them in windows is the windows NEVER see's the second or subsequent partitions, it only see's the first partition of the USB thingy.

I've read others comments on that, but I do not know if that is a "set in stone" rule or not.

I just did a USB-ZIP install to a USB thingy, it made two partitions on it's own, one small one for DSL and the rest free.

Posted by Sparken on April 19 2006,04:47

I'm a little late on this one, but incase anyone wants to do a multiple partition USB stick install with DSL...

1) Install DSL to the USB stick as you normally would.
this will erase the entire drive space and set up one big partition (SDA1)

2) once you are satisfied that it is working that way, boots up etc...
Use another Linux machine(B) with the parted program installed
on it, to modify the drive. Plug your usb drive into machine B, let it recognize
the drive, but make sure it is not mounted, or unmount it if it automounts.

3) Run parted and resize the partition to the size you want the bootable
DSL partition to be. ( I set mine to 100Megs) . Then create a second partition
of type fat16 using the rest of the drive. Write the changes and exit

4) assuming the new partition is sda2, you will need to format it
mkfs.vfat /dev/sda2

And you are done. 2 partitions. (On Windows XP, I can actually see both partitions)

Here is some parted help:
< Parted User Manual >

Posted by cmanb on April 19 2006,13:05

How will doing this effect an embedded system? I'd need about 100mb for both DSL and QEMU, but then if I have another 50mb freed up, will that be another harddrive that QEMU will recognize if booted embedded? Or will it be lost space? Because hdb will still be part of that initial 100mb partition.

I can see the advantage of doing this for a frugal boot though.

Posted by Sparken on April 20 2006,04:17

I Don't have any experience with proc emulators. All I could
offer is speculation. I would imagine that if you formatted the
second partition using a file system that the emulated OS
would recognize, it should just see it as a second drive.

Posted by mpen on April 20 2006,07:05

why are we getting so complicated?

boot a DSL 2.3 live cd, and install to USB-ZIP from there.... that creats a 50MB partition for you which it puts DSL on, and partitions the rest for general use....

Posted by rhyek on April 21 2006,06:07

mpen, the problem with that is sda2 won't be visible to windows. that's not much good for some people.
anyways, i'm confused here. it's possible to see the second partition within windows if we format it after doing the usb-zip install using some file system type? great, which, what command should i use? :cool:

Posted by anaconda on April 21 2006,08:57

öööööh?

Windows CAN see several partitions in USB-drives. Unless you have formatted the second partition to ext2 or ext3 or to any other format that windows doesn't regognize

If you install this you can use ext2/3 with windows!
< http://www.fs-driver.org/ >

Posted by rhyek on April 22 2006,00:08

sure about that? i just did the usb-zip install which makes the second partition as a win95 fat partition or something by default. can't see it in win xp

Posted by rhyek on April 22 2006,03:32

if i use the disk management tool on windows, i can see the second partition/volume. can't use it because it won't let me assign it a drive letter stating the volumn isn't enabled. i should restart to enable it

anyways, i thought about resizing the usb-zip created partitions. make sda2 about 30 megs big, and sda1 take all the rest. this way i could just use sda2 for dsl backup and sda1 inside windows as well as for dsl booting.
tried parted, won't let me. says it can't currently resize partitions of that type to the size i'm trying. i'm guessing it's cuz of the geometry. i was succesful resizing it to 50megs :laugh:

running out of options here.