Thumb Drive Screwed Up

Forum: USB booting
Topic: Thumb Drive Screwed Up
started by: Starr

Posted by Starr on Aug. 10 2005,04:25

I installed DSL on my thumb drive and it didn't work. So I went into Windows and reformatted the thumb drive. But it says that the drive was only 49.1MB when it is supposed to be 256MB. In the disk management there appears to be 2 partitions. One that is formatted and 50 MB and another which is unformatted and is 200MB. The thing is I cannot delete the unformatted partition or the formatted one and I can't format the un formatted partition (The 200MB one). How can I fix this? I really want my 256MB jump drive to work again.

Posted by rfusca on Aug. 10 2005,05:07

I'm facing something similar. I can get the partitions back, simply cfdisk it (go into linux, cfdisk /dev/sda (assumming thats where your drive is) and then reformat/repartition as needed), but I can't ever seem to get the 2nd partition to show up in windows xp. It shows up as unformatted and non-active, so that it can't be formatted or mounted. Anybody know how to get the partition that isn't holding the drive to show up?

Posted by SaidinUnleashed on Aug. 10 2005,06:42

Windows cannot see past the first partition on USB Mass Storage Devices.

Blame M$.

-J.P.

Posted by cbagger01 on Aug. 10 2005,16:14

If you want to blow away your USB drive partitions and start over, you can do this from DSL (Not responsible for lost data. This assumes that your USB drive is located at /dev/sda)

Boot DSL from livecd, plug in your USB drive, wait a few seconds for it to get detected. Then open an xterminal and type:

sudo su
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
sync
cfdisk /dev/sda

and either use cfdisk to create a new FAT partition (partition type = 6) that is the same size as your entire USB drive, or you can create a blank partition table and save it and then exit. If you create a blank partition table, you can use Microsoft Windows to repartition the drive and reformat it.

Hope this helps.

Also, you might want to try the USBHDD pendrive install instead of the USBZIP install. It will create a single FAT partition that can be read by both DSL and MSWindows.

If your computer BIOS does not support direct booting from USBHDD devices (most newer Dells will boot from USBHDD), then you can make a DSL usbboot floppy disk and it will work.

Posted by Starr on Aug. 10 2005,21:42

I fixed it!!!! What I did was I used a different format option in linux to reinstall the OS on the jump drive and it re partitioned the Jump Drive to one partition which Windows recognized. So I just formatted in Windows and I got my space back.

My computer only supports booting from USB-FDD and USB-ZIP. Can I make a DSL boot with USB-FDD? Or do I have to stick with zip?

Posted by cbagger01 on Aug. 11 2005,03:39

You can still try a USBHDD format and see if it works with your BIOS. You never know.

Also, you can see if you get get a BIOS upgrade for your computer.

Otherwise, you may need a usb floppy boot disk in order to get it to work with your computer.

Finally, if you are adventurous, you can edit the USBZIP install script and change the formatting process so that you have a large (250MB?) partition #1 FAT and a small 6MB? partition #2 for linux backups.

Posted by Starr on Aug. 11 2005,03:51

Well, I tried to install it has a USBZIP again but when I boot off of the USB I get a ton of errors. I tried the commands from the other thread but they don't seem to be doing anything.