Partition a USB Flash Drive in Windows XP

One way to Partition a USB Flash Drive from Windows XP and mark it active “bootable”. Windows detects Flash Drives as “Removable Disks” and flash drives are typically shipped formatted as a “Super Floppy” (USB-FDD without a partition table) . The Windows built in format utility cannot create a partition table on Removable Disks. Furthermore, the diskpart utility in Windows XP will not allow you to partition Removable Media, although diskpart does work for partitioning a Flash Drive from Windows Vista/7.

To address the inability to Partition a Flash Drive in Windows XP, you need to use a third party low level partitioning tool such as BOOTICE, created by Pauly. BOOTICE Home Page

Note: I partition my flash drives as USB-HDD (with a partition table), simply because my computers support booting from Flash Drives formatted to be seen as a USB Hard Disk.

One way to Partition a Flash Drive from Windows

1. Download BOOTICE, unzip, and run BOOTICE.EXE
2. Make sure your “USB Flash Drive” is set as the Destination Disk
3. Click Parts Manage
4. Click ReFormat USB Disk
5. Select USB-HDD mode, and click Next
6. Select Format as Fat32, and click OK

You should now have an active “bootable” USB-HDD Fat32 formatted Flash Drive, containing a partition table with a single partition. You should be able to Boot It as a Hard Drive.

USB multiboot using Ubuntu

After a great article from hak5 I tried to find a good solution to create a personal bootable usb dongle. The best tool with a GUI seems to be UNetbootin a cross platform application that let the user select an iso image bootable from an usb drive.

The interface is simple and easy to use : you can choose a linux distribution, you can select an iso file or even an old floppy image. It’s best to format your drive using fat32 file system. After that just select the iso you want and the appliction will make the usb bootable for you.

Until now this was nothing new, the cool trick however is to make it multi bootable.

The path I choose for this is simple :

step1 – after the first iso installation, copy all the files to your local hard drive.

step2 – delete everything on the usb and install the second iso file

step3 – copy the old backup from your hard drive and make sure no folders overlap

step4 ( optional ) – in case the linux distribution is the same try to change the folder and the menu.ls file so it points to the renamed files and folders

This list is not complete without a few good recomandation any linux geek should have at his disposal at any time

• Live antivirus  : f-secure-rescue-cd
• File recovery : Ubuntu remix rescue cd
• Network audit : BackTrack 4 linux distribution
• Partition manager – Gparted