Different partition layout for USB flash drives

Forum: DSL Ideas and Suggestions
Topic: Different partition layout for USB flash drives
started by: Imroy

Posted by Imroy on Aug. 10 2005,09:03

I have a 256MB USB flash drive and managed to get DSL 1.2 installed on it a month or two ago. But the partition layout is around the wrong way. That is, there's a 50MB partition for holding the compressed Knoppix filesystem, then there's a second partition for holding user data. This is 200MB for my device.

I had previously loaded useful software on my device and would like to continue doing this. With the current layout, on a windows machine I only see a 50MB "disk", and it's like 99% full. So what I would like is to reverse the partitions. Have a 50MB second partition with the compressed filesystem, essentially invisible to windows. Leave the "rest" available as the first partition, where it's easily accessable from windows. It would also be nice if this MyDSL stuff saved its backup.tar.gz file in a seperate directory. That way I can continue using my USB flash drive for storing other data but also boot into it.

I've tried doing this myself but haven't gotten too far. I'm trying to get my head around what the "linuxrc" script is doing in the initrd image, and what I need to change. Any suggestions or feedback?

Posted by cbagger01 on Aug. 10 2005,16:25

Yes, easy suggestion:

Boot from the DSL livecd.
Insert your USB drive and wait a few seconds to be detected.
Go to the pendrive install scripts and choose USBHDD install (fresh install, NOT upgrade).

The USBHDD install script will install DSL to a single 256MB FAT partition that can be viewed by both DSL and by MSWindows. Your backup/restore data will also be saved to this location.

If your computer BIOS does not support direct booting from a USBHDD device (most newer BIOS does support this, especially Dells), you can then download the usbboot floppy image and create a USB boot floppy disk that will work fine.