Coreyja

I posted this earlier in the Episode thread but thought I would post it again so it would be easier to find for anybody that wanted it. This tutorial is about how to set up a USB multipass with 2 partitions. One for the multipass stuff and another to use for everyday files. Just for reference I used an 8 GB patriot flash drive when doing this. First I did the whole PE2USB and Grub stuff without any partitions. (If you have partitions running PE2USB will delete them anyways.) So now my whole 8 GB flash drive was bootable. Now I needed to make another partition for my files and this is where it got tricky. Windows only sees the first partition and currently that was the boot partition so just shrinking the boot partition and creating a new one wouldn't work. (Note: I used GParted in Ubuntu to do all of the partitioning but I assume these steps would work in any other program.) What I ended up doing to get around the windows first partition problem is this. First I set up my usb with all of the different tools I wanted on it. This was so I could do all the work in windows and so that I knew how much space the boot partition needed. Once I had the multipass done with all the tools I wanted I restarted my machine and booted into Ubuntu. In Ubuntu I opened up GParted and changed the devices so I could see the flash drive. The first thing I did was shrink down the current partition to fit the multipass data I already had on there. ( I left an extra 100 MB on that partition just to be safe.) Then I copied the multipass partition and pasted it onto the same flash drive all the way to the right. Then i right clicked on the new partition and edited the flags. I put the boot flag and the hidden flag on this new partition. (I used the hidden flag because I have a mac and this hides the partition) I then edited the flags of the old partition and removed the boot flag. Then I changed the labels of the partitions. I called the original one "Files" and the new one "Boot". Then i made the original partition(Files) big enough to fill the rest of the empty space. I then mounted the old partition(Files) and deleted everything. That is all you have to do! Now the Files partition will be viewable in windows and mac but the Boot one will not be. You can still boot from this drive and everything works fine! One draw back to this is that you have to use Ubuntu to edit the Boot partition. Ubuntu ignores the Hidden flag that I used earlier so both partitions appear automatically. Also if you want to add anything to the Boot partition you have to resize both partitions. Hope this helps out somebody and that everybody can understand it! (I'm not that good at making tutorials!) Let me know if anything needs clarifying and I will try and help.

What worked for me is to view to USB drive in GParted and set the flag of the partition you want to boot from as "Boot".

Name: Corey (Shouldn't have been that hard to guess) Favorite Game: Stuff on my iPhone (not a big gamer) Favorite OS: Mac OSX but i use everything Nationality: American Sex: Male Age: 16 Status: Single Height: 5' 4" or 1.6 meters for you metric people Favorite Author: Dan Brown Favorite Movie: Eagle Eye Favorite TV Show: NCIS Hobbies: Programming and Archery Occupation: High School Student

Those battering ram videos are awesome! Wish I could have been there!

i did a tutorial a few pages back on how to partition the drive and use it like a normal flash drive and also a multipass. This should work for you. Just backup everything from the flash drive now so you can restore it later. Hope this helps!

Ya that is one of the most serious drawbacks the other being you have to change the size of both partitions to add a tool. I have Ububtu dual booted on one of my comps so using Ububtu was less of a problem for me then it would be for alot of people. The point if this was to remove the mess from the drive. I didn't want to see all of the files from the boot stuff everytime I plugged in the drive. I tried just making a files folder but didn't like it and eventually figured out how to do this.

A while back i posted that I got partitions to work with this but i ran into problems and just figured out how to actually get it to work. I thought I would post a tutorial for people who wanted to do the same thing. The reason I did all of this is I wanted to be able to use my 8 GB drive for everyday files and also with the multipass. Here is what I did. First I did the whole PE2USB and Grub stuff without any partitions. (If you have partitions running PE2USB will delete them anyways.) So now my whole 8 GB flash drive was bootable. Now I needed to make another partition for my files and this is where it got tricky. Windows only sees the first partition and currently that was the boot partition so just shrinking the boot partition and creating a new one wouldn't work. (Note: I used GParted in Ubuntu to do all of the partitioning but I assume these steps would work in any other program.) What I ended up doing to get around the windows first partition problem is this. First I set up my usb with all of the different tools I wanted on it. This was so I could do all the work in windows and so that I knew how much space the boot partition needed. Once I had the multipass done with all the tools I wanted I restarted my machine and booted into Ubuntu. In Ubuntu I opened up GParted and changed the devices so I could see the flash drive. The first thing I did was shrink down the current partition to fit the multipass data I already had on there. ( I left an extra 100 MB on that partition just to be safe.) Then I copied the multipass partition and pasted it onto the same flash drive all the way to the right. Then i right clicked on the new partition and edited the flags. I put the boot flag and the hidden flag on this new partition. (I used the hidden flag because I have a mac and this hides the partition) I then edited the flags of the old partition and removed the boot flag. Then I changed the labels of the partitions. I called the original one "Files" and the new one "Boot". Then i made the original partition(Files) big enough to fill the rest of the empty space. I then mounted the old partition(Files) and deleted everything. That is all you have to do! Now the Files partition will be viewable in windows and mac but the Boot one will not be. You can still boot from this drive and everything works fine! One draw back to this is that you have to use Ubuntu to edit the Boot partition. Ubuntu ignores the Hidden flag that I used earlier so both partitions appear automatically. Also if you want to add anything to the Boot partition you have to resize both partitions. Hope this helps out somebody and that everybody can understand it! (I'm not that good at making tutorials!) Let me know if anything needs clarifying and I will try and help.

Frank Castle: I got the partitions to work for me pretty easily.First I set up the multipass on the flashdrive without partitioning it. Then I used Ubuntu and gparted create a new partition and leave enough room in the old partition for all the boot stuff. I them used labels to mark the boot partition as hidden. This seems to allow it to boot fine but be hidden in windows. The other partition is not hidden and works fine in windows. I can still see both partitions in Ubuntu so editing the boot partition is stil pretty easy. I do have a question tho. I have gotten nt password to boot but when it boots it cant find the harddrive where windows is installed. it just finds the 2 partitions of my flash drive. here is what i used for grub.i just copied Darren's from the show notes. any ideas of why this is or how to fix it? title ntpasswd kernel /ntpasswd/vmlinuz rw vga=1 initrd=/ntpasswd/initrd.cgz /ntpasswd/scsi.cgz initrd /ntpasswd/initrd.cgz

has anybody got a "BT4 data not found" error when they try and boot BT4? for me it happens when you see the BT4 boot screen and everything is starting. it says it cant find the livecd.sgn file which i have and tells me to shutdown the computer. any ideas?

jdogherman: Thanks for the tips! Im going to start on all of this now!

i thought of something like that at first but thought you needed all of the boot stuff in the root directory. since you dont i will try the same thing. should be easier than doing partitions. thanks!

Has anybody thought of making 2 partitions on a flash drive. One for the multiboot and one for everyday files. This would work great for me but dont no if it will work. Any idea? i might just try and see what happens.