Is it possible to create multiple partitions on a USB flash drive?

Hi,

If only there was a way to change that and make a USB flash drive be detected as a USB hard disk...

I've tried just about anything I could find but none of it seems to work.
That said, some of that stuff that emulates a removable drive "might" work on a 32 bit system. I just could be bothered to load one just for that purpose.

Also, these tools that can flip the RMB may work if you happen to have the right brand of drive. This is highly unlikely as most of this stuff is rather old.

The only USB drive I have that I can partition any way I want is a Mushkin, which is basically a SSD built on top of a USB controller. These are of the expensive kind though.


Cheers,

There is no trick there, if it is an SSD, it is always seen as a mass storage USB device. The point is to make a regular USB Flash drive be detected as a low capacity SSD.

Made an account just to share that this thread helped my specific case, and that my solution may help spapakons need as well.

I purchased a 128 GB flash drive that i wanted to generally use as a flash drive but also boot Ubuntu when needed. I did not want to have live disk files mixed with everything else, so i partitioned and ran into same problem as you that windows did not like the second partition.

So... I switched the partition order. Made the NTFS into the first partition on the disk (most of the space, works with everything, works with large files), and a second 8GB partition FAT32 for the live disk (and a third partition for 2GB swap as well). Windows recognizes the NTFS, and i do not need to access the live disk from windows. And booting from the USB works so far with no special effort on the single computer I have tried :).

So, I suspect your use case is not that different than mine, but i could be wrong. Hope it helps!

socrateks said:

Made an account just to share that this thread helped my specific case, and that my solution may help spapakons need as well.

I purchased a 128 GB flash drive that i wanted to generally use as a flash drive but also boot Ubuntu when needed. I did not want to have live disk files mixed with everything else, so i partitioned and ran into same problem as you that windows did not like the second partition.

So... I switched the partition order. Made the NTFS into the first partition on the disk (most of the space, works with everything, works with large files), and a second 8GB partition FAT32 for the live disk (and a third partition for 2GB swap as well). Windows recognizes the NTFS, and i do not need to access the live disk from windows. And booting from the USB works so far with no special effort on the single computer I have tried :).

So, I suspect your use case is not that different than mine, but i could be wrong. Hope it helps!

Hello!

It is a good idea, but I had already created the Mac OS installation in the flash disk. I would have to use a utility that supports HFS partitions to move the partition to the end of the drive and then create a FAT32 or NTFS partition at the start. I don't know if this is possible and if doing that the USB remains bootable to install Mac OS or troubleshoot Mac OS startup. Anyway I have deleted that flash drive, so I cannot check it. Thank you for the suggestion. I'll have it in mind next time, if the relevant utility would allow writing the Mac OS data on a second partition instead of formatting the disk.

socrateks said:

a second 8GB partition FAT32 for the live disk

Did you install Ubuntu onto this partition or just save the ISO file there?
Did you have to set the partition to primary?

Well I know you can create two partitions in a Flash drive using a Linux utility (eg Gparted). I could then format one as HFS to create a bootable Mac OS installer and the other as FAT32 or NTFS to use with Windows. I have used Aparted for Android to create a second partition formatted as ext4 (for Linux or Android) to a micro SD card, so I can use the second partition to move some Android applications from my Android smartphone to the card (with Link2SD or similar utility). This allows me to install much more applications than the available internal storage capacity of my smartphone. In a smartphone or tablet supporting OTG, one can also connect a USB Flash drive and create multiple partitions, but doing that in Ubuntu using Gparted is much easier. You don't need to install Ubuntu, just boot from a Live CD.