So, I had essentially dead 32GB Kingston DataTraveler G2 that went erratic and slow about a month after I bought it (yes web vendor ignored me as usual :) Ideal piece of hardware for trying crazy things :-)
Other folks reported that PeToUSB may not recognize large UDF-s and my first attempt was no different (Vista laptop but with LUA killed => always admin :D), but then when I rebooted with the fawlty Kingston G2 in, all of the sudden it got recognized as size 0 drive. I'll explain the Kingston mess latter -- the point here is if anyone knows sho maintains that PeToUSB -- it might be artificially cutting off drives by size.
So, I ran PeToUSB, it errored out, but it left a 1.4 GB primary FAT partition (1403 MB to be exact), recognized as "volume" by disk manager (meaning it let's me delete and re-create and is recognized as fixed drive). Mind you that this Kingston never saw 2 partitions during it's short life and it never saw that speed (15-20 GB/s) either. Therefore, the first question for people more experienced in these matters is - is there a way to pull the same trick but get a larger first partition? PeToUSB, obviously did something special to burn some brainz into this dead horse. An MBR specific MBR trick maybe? Custom FAT/FAT32 tables?
Another reboot and the "rest" of the drive showed up, 31,54 GB, but only as a "removable" that can't be recreated, resized or anything and is every bit as slow and erratic as it always was (3.7 MB/s max), wiring garbled file/folder entries into FAT or dir tables when on a faster USB port and/or after 15+ min of continuous file copying.
2nd question - does anyone know a way/tool to repartition this further (on an off chance that Kingston G2 firmware just can't handle large partition sizes)
3rd question - is there way to boot from first USB partition but to keep some data (iso-s, img-s ...) on the 2nd, 3rd ... and make sure that they are discoverable at boot time regardless of which partitions actual hdd in a PC has (probably a device naming/identification question).
4th question - if there's a way to do #3, can other partitions be NTFS? Seems to keep large UDF-s a lot more stable, plus I seem to remember that FAT32 has 4GB as a general compatibility limit. Not that it will necessarily help this broken Kingston, but I bought another 32GB in the meantime and it works too well to try crazy things on it.
5th question - any tool that could create multiple partitions in a way as dirty as PeToUSB, but maybe the one that knows how to do FAT32 or NTFS? Talking nice and clean to this Kingston hasn't helped - I assume that PeToUSB just writes the bytes where it wants without checking much, and while it may break in other cases, it seems to have fixed the nut case :-) so I'm looking for both the "nice" and "dirty" options here.
Any other ideas / experiences / tools, ideas on what else to put into that 32GB space (haven't really planned on having 32 GB "boot/live" drive - even XP+2k3 x86+x64 is still "just" a 4 GB ).