booting DSL off of a 2nd partition on a usb drive

Forum: USB booting
Topic: booting DSL off of a 2nd partition on a usb drive
started by: index26

Posted by index26 on Sep. 16 2005,18:47

I recently bought a 512mb usb drive to install dsl and run it while I'm in school. 512mb is a lot of space and I only really need 250mb for dsl and mydsl apps. The rest of the space I wanted to dedicate to storage when I use windows.

So, this is what happened:
1) I booted up DSL from CD and installed DSL onto my usb drive.
2) I resized my usb drive into 3 partitions (sda1, sda2, sda3; for example). sda1 contains dsl, sda2 would contain myDSL apps and the backup.tar.gz file and sda3 is empty storage space.
3) DSL boots fine and I can load downloaded myDSL apps fine.

Now, here is where the problem occurs. When I boot into Windows, it recognizes my USB Drive, but only shows the first partition that has DSL installed on to it. What I really want is to have windows see *at least* my 3rd partition which is my storage.

It looks like Windows only reads the first partition of the USB drive and nothing else. So, I decided to try and move the DSL installation on my 2nd partition (now the 1st partition would be my storage, 2nd partition has DSL installed and 3rd parttition has myDSL apps and the backup.tar.gz). I used parted and resized my partition and then did a "dd" to copy the whole installation from partition 1 to partition 2. I set the boot flag to partition 2.

When I rebooted and tried to boot into my USB drive...it wouldn't do it.

So, my question is, how would I go about installing DSL on the 2nd partition of my usb drive to get DSL to boot from it?

Posted by HyperY2K on Sep. 18 2005,16:17

I've got the same problem. Any solutions for that?
where can i change from /dev/sda1 to /dev/sda2?

Posted by HyperY2K on Sep. 24 2005,09:05

which configuration file need to be edited to change to boot partition?
Is there any possibility to use the 2nd partition as a option during Stick-Setup...

Posted by 9a6or on Sep. 25 2005,21:07

Read my story (which ended up with a nice solution) on < this thread >