Peplexing pendrive partitions

Forum: USB booting
Topic: Peplexing pendrive partitions
started by: Herr Dreier

Posted by Herr Dreier on Aug. 15 2006,04:32

Hi, people. I recently installed DSL 3.0.1 to a USB pendrive. When I connect the pendrive to my Windows XP system, the 50mb partition shows up as the E:\ drive. Is there something that I can do to access the other partition from Windows, maybe through a third-party file browser or by getting Windows to treat the second partition as a second removable drive? I know... this is much easier to do in Linux, but I still have the need to do this from Windows.

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Aug. 15 2006,18:01

Apparently windows will only see the first visible partition for usb devices.

You could mark it as hidden (since I do not think you need to access that 50mb partition anyways), or search for other software.

Posted by Herr Dreier on Aug. 16 2006,01:03

Any suggestions on how to hide the partition?

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Aug. 16 2006,01:54

I think any disk utility can do that, like fdisk/cfdisk.

Posted by Hawk2 on Aug. 24 2006,12:49

I made sda1 hidden, but it was still visible under windows

I use an mp3player ... and I still want to listen to the music. When i make usbhdd install, then i can listen to music, but the DSL isn`t booting ... and when I make usbzip install, then it boots, but I can`t listen to music :angry:

On the usbhdd install, it doesn`t boot, but if I boot from cd with "dsl fromhd=/dev/sda1" then it loads from mp3player.

I don`t know if thats it, but when making the usbhdd install it shows "Total number of sectors not a multiple of sectors per track" and when i force to boot usbhdd then it shows "This is not a bootable disk. Please insert a bootable floppy and press any key to try again..."

I tried to manually do things like were in pendrive_usbzip.sh but for one partition, and it failed again [497MB]. When i try to do like in pendrive_usbhdd.sh then at the moment when I write "syslinux /dev/hda" it shows some error about the incorrect number of sectors [or sth like that, I don`t remember ;)]

Any idea how to have both DSL and mp3player working on 1 device? :cool:

[of course with booting from mp3player

not from CD]

EDIT:

I know, that when I make single partition usbzip then I can listen to the music ... but when i try to boot the DSL then it shows "Syslinux (2003.06.06) boot failed" or sth like that ... :| is it not supported to have a 497MB usb-zip partition? Or I made something wrong? I tried to make it like in the dual-partition script from LiveCD, but without creating the second partition.

Posted by humpty on Aug. 25 2006,00:59

Tips for swapping the two usb-zip paritions;

< http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....42;st=5 >
< http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....79;st=0 >

If you want only 1 partition (usb-hdd) then you could trying changing your drive geometry. Try searching for 'geometry' in these forums.

Posted by Hawk2 on Aug. 25 2006,07:25

Yay! It worked ... I made the mp3player bootable with the HP utility, then removed the *.iso files and vmlinuz, copied the DSL files from CD and edited the HP syslinux file:

Quote

#hpdkbu
default flash
prompt 1
timeout 30
say Hawk2`s way of DSL booting ;)
label flash
kernel linux24
append ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us apm=power-off vga=791 initrd=minirt24.gz nomce noapic quiet BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix

Now I can listen to music on mp3player and boot DSL from it