Partitioning a USB Flash Stick/Card

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jimburns
Posts: 7
Joined: Fri Jun 15, 2012 6:05 pm

Partitioning a USB Flash Stick/Card

Post by jimburns »

I'm trying to partition an SD card in half and BIBM proceeds easily enough with its partition tools. However, I can never see the 2nd partition under windows XP Pro or 7. Drive Manager sees the drive, sees the first NTFS partition but not the 2nd FAT32 partition.

This worked well on a 1TB Passport where I needed half of the drive a 500G NTFS and the other half FAT32... but I'm stuck on the micro flash card.

Any thoughts appreciated.

/j
a1pcfixer
Posts: 183
Joined: Wed Aug 31, 2011 6:13 am

Re: Partitioning a USB Flash Stick/Card

Post by a1pcfixer »

Jimburns,

> I'm trying to partition an SD card in half and BIBM proceeds easily enough with its partition tools. However, I can never see the 2nd partition under windows XP Pro or 7.

Look back in this support area for.....

Subject: Re: Using BIBM to make multi-partioned USB thumb drive
--

Jim L.
Using - Virtual Access(OLR)
http://www.virtual-access.org
6.3.0.5 Windows Vista Service Pack 2 build 6002

DrTeeth
Posts: 1289
Joined: Fri Aug 12, 2011 6:58 pm

Re: Partitioning a USB Flash Stick/Card

Post by DrTeeth »

On Fri, 15 Jun 2012 11:13:09 PDT, just as I was about to take a herb,
jimburns disturbed my reverie and wrote:

>Any thoughts appreciated.

You may have to give the second (invisible) partition a drive letter
to make it visible under windows - you do this within windows itself.
--

Cheers

DrT
______________________________
We may not be able to prevent the stormy times in
our lives; but we can always choose to dance
in the puddles (Jewish proverb).
mjnelson99
Posts: 785
Joined: Fri Aug 12, 2011 1:24 am

Re: Partitioning a USB Flash Stick/Card

Post by mjnelson99 »

Will Windows even be able to do that since it cannot create
2 partitions on the flash card itself?
Mary

On 6/16/2012 11:04 AM, DrTeeth wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Jun 2012 11:13:09 PDT, just as I was about to take a herb,
> jimburns disturbed my reverie and wrote:
>
>> Any thoughts appreciated.
>
> You may have to give the second (invisible) partition a drive letter
> to make it visible under windows - you do this within windows itself.
> --
>
> Cheers
>
> DrT
> ______________________________
> We may not be able to prevent the stormy times in
> our lives; but we can always choose to dance
> in the puddles (Jewish proverb).
>
>

jimburns
Posts: 7
Joined: Fri Jun 15, 2012 6:05 pm

Re: Partitioning a USB Flash Stick/Card

Post by jimburns »

Yeah.. I'm fighting this one. I'm trying to keep this simple and straightforward but I dunno... an external usb hard drive, wd passport for example, is recognized as a hard drive, even though removable, and windows will see multiple partitions. The flash drive, seen as removable, yet not as a hard drive in and of itself, and windows doesn't want to see mutiple partitions.

I've not yet found a working tool that will make a usb flash/card appear as a hard drive, fixed rather than usb, flash... the lexar utility does not appear to work on my sandisk micro SD cards and appears to have no effect.

So as it stands, I don't yet see any direct way, independent of Windows itself (for example, one option is to use different drivers for accessing the flash drive, but this would involve a configuration change in windows itself), to have a flash drive appear as a HDD. At least not as a straightforward, edit the drive parameters/mbr/whatever, tool.

The other option is a complete multi-boot system, which I'm not totally against, but that would require turning my BIBM "drive" into a bootable ISO and adding to my multi-boot card. Which maybe fine, but my BIBM disk-print is barely 3MB and I'd like to just use it directly off of smaller 1G and 2G microSD cards that have little other value. Even at 1G, it's hard to give BIBM the entire 1G card when it only requires 3MB of space. Still, this method would require being able to build a bootable ISO from either a flash drive or a set of folders, which (see my other post) I've not yet figured out either, as all my ISO tools seem only to support imaging FROM some optical drive directly, not a flash or set of directories! Ugh!

And the biggest rub off all... this should be possible without any of these headaches. There is no reason a removable flash media drive should be specifically PREVENTED from hosting multiple partitions.

Ideas are appreciated.

/j
DrTeeth
Posts: 1289
Joined: Fri Aug 12, 2011 6:58 pm

Re: Partitioning a USB Flash Stick/Card

Post by DrTeeth »

On Sat, 16 Jun 2012 09:28:24 PDT, just as I was about to take a herb,
mjnelson99 disturbed my reverie and wrote:

>Will Windows even be able to do that since it cannot create
>2 partitions on the flash card itself?

If it can see it.
--

Cheers

DrT
______________________________
We may not be able to prevent the stormy times in
our lives; but we can always choose to dance
in the puddles (Jewish proverb).
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