usb - Partition Bootable Flash Drive

11
2013-09
  • iAndr0idOs

    I created a bootable flash drive with Chromium OS installed on it. However, Chromium OS only needs about 4GB of space, and my flash drive is 8GB.

    I wanted to make the rest of the 4GB a FAT32 partition, but when I look at GParted, I have 12 different partitions on the flash drive with unallocated space scattered everywhere.

    I made the bootable flash drive with Ubuntu Linux's usb-imagecreator. I run Ubuntu Linux 11.04 x86_64 and Windows 7 Professional 64-bit.

    If any of you have experience with this, any help would be appreciated.

    • Answers
  • Journeyman Geek

    In theory, you'd have to flip the 'removable media' bit before you can partition it (which convinces windows its a regular USB HDD) - supposedly lexar bootit can do it, but its nearly impossible to find.


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    windows - Partitioning a bootable Flash drive
  • mmc

    Is it possible to have a 2 partition Flash drive that looks like the following:

    • A partition that is bootable to OS X (this will require a GUID partition table)
    • A second partition formatted either FAT32 or NTFS that is readable on both OS X and various flavors of Windows

    I have set up a disk using Disk Utility on the Mac, and it boots fine with a second FAT32 partition... but Windows does not see it. Any flavor of Windows wants to format the entire drive.

    Has anyone done this, and if so, can you explain the steps you followed?

    EDIT: Making it bootable is no problem. I have that. I'm wondering how to make the second partition on a Flash drive visible to Windows. It's possible that the "second partition" is the problem, and I need Windows to be first, and HFS to be second. I'll try that tonight.


    • Related Answers
  • Chris Nava

    Unfortunately, the windows accessable partition must be the first partition on a thumb drive or windows will not mount it. Linux installs can get around this limitation by putting the bootloader configuration files on the windows partition and everything else on the second partition. I'm not sure if you can do this with Mac though. My Mac is to old to try (as it is PPC based.)

  • mcandre

    The Geniuses at the Apple stores use external USB drives that boot to Mac OS X. So it's possible.

    iHackintosh shows you how. rEFIt helps to make drives bootable for Mac and Windows. You'll need something like it in order to keep the two partition managers (Mac and Windows/Linux) in sync.