Multiple Partitions on USB Multipass

[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.