Help with USB Flash Drive Partitioning

[HeXetic]

I'm looking for some software that will create 2 partitions on a flash drive, Partition Magic doesn't work and neither does Acronis. Free software would be perfect but if not thats still fine.

[Echilon]

I don't know whether that's even possible. Two partitions would imply two drive letters under windows, which I don't think would work. What are you trying to do?

[Ferret]

This could be possible.... I run Windows Mobile 2003SE on my phone, and apparently you can partition the SD card, and have two partition's on the phone.

So if it's "possible" for a memory card, then surley it's possible for a USB thumb drive ?

I don't know how authentic the article was, because when I tried it, it didn't work !

[Brian M. Veteran]

It wont work because your trying to treat a flash drive as a hard drive :)

First of all, try this: http://www.compuapps.com/Download/swissknife/swissknife.htm

Secondly, theres a crazy method i found on another forum...

"So I booted from my XP disk and ran setup like I was installing windows... and when it gets to the part where you select the drive, I saw the flash drive there and was able to manipulate the partitions. I deleted all partitions and created 1 2GB partition, then I exited the setup and booted normally. All I had to do was format the drive, and voila..."

[+orgitnized Subscriber¹]

This is a stretch, but you could use a program like TrueCrypt to make a secure file on the drive. When you mount it, it'll be a seperate partition...so you'll have the original USB partition and the a file that's treated like another drive and will be mounted as another drive letter.

Like I said, it's a stretch, but that's what I do with mine and it's worked great so far. ;)

[JaceMan]

It wont work because your trying to treat a flash drive as a hard drive :)

Sorry for posting in an old "dead" thread, but I was looking for some information to help a friend with a problem when Google brought me upon this thread. I decided to register and correct this information for anyone who wanders through here later.

USB flash drives CAN INDEED be formatted and have multiple partitions. In fact, "most" partition managers are capable of doing the job if they can A) resize existing partitions and B) write to flash based memory.

For the chore at hand, I would highly suggest downloading the LiveCD version of the Linux partition manager gParted. I myself have used it to create flash drives that contain a bootable Linux distro in one partition (LiveUSB so to speak) and then a vfat partition holding data that I can share with Windows users.

Check it out!

Checking out NeoWin before registering -- I just may stick around.