Partitioned Flash with DSL

Forum: USB booting
Topic: Partitioned Flash with DSL
started by: doenitz16

Posted by doenitz16 on Mar. 18 2007,05:11

Does anyone know if there is a way to get Windows XP to be able to read a second partition on a USB flash drive, without having access to administrator rights? I know Windows doesn't have a problem with a flash hard drive having multiple partitions, but I just installed DSL to my flash but now my second partition doesn't show up. Linux of course doesn't have a problem mounting the 2nd partition.

Any ideas on if this can be fixed or an easy work around -- maybe make the DSL partition ext3 and the 2nd one the FAT partition instead of both partitions being FAT?

Posted by Juanito on Mar. 18 2007,05:51

I have the same problem with DSL-N on a 1GB usb stick - if I format the stick as one single partition, DSL-N will not boot.

Windows cannot read more than one partition on a usb stick, so maybe the best thing to do would be to boot DSL from the second partition. If the mydsl folder and back-up/restore are set to the first partition, along with any data folders, then they would be accesible from Windows.

Note that I posted an extension, syslinux-mssys.dsl, that will work on FAT32 partitions from DSL so you can create the usb stick layout described above manually.

Posted by doenitz16 on Mar. 19 2007,00:55

That sounds like a decent idea, but it was my understanding that a flash drive can only be booted off the first partition. From what I have read elsewhere, Windows cannot read more than one partition on a flash unless you do a bunch of work to trick it into treating the flash drive as a hard disk--requires root priviledges.

So a final question would be since windows can read the first partition fine, would it be okay to make a folder on the DSL partition and put files on there that need to be copied back and forth all the time? Or would this corrupt the DSL filesystem since I believe it is supposed to be read only?

Posted by Juanito on Mar. 19 2007,03:21

In DSL I can modify any file on the boot partition (I cannot do this on DSL-N), so you should be OK.