A while ago I Partitioned my USB stick using some tool that was able to change some things on the USB stick. Using my Windows 2000 I needed to install some driver before those partitions were recognized by the system.
Today I plugged the USB stick into a Windows XP machine and to my amazement the USB stick showed up as 2 different drive letters in explorer. Great for those who like to partition their USB stick. I have tried it on an XP with SP2 and one with SP3.
Now the 'downside' of my story; you will need some tool to partition the USB stick or partition it on Linux using PartEd or similar.
As said I used some tool to partition my stick and that tool was specific for the controller contained in the stick, so I can't just give you the tool. But maybe someone can suggest an (open source) partition app.
So it seems the stories about Windows not supporting partitioned USB sticks is, eh, not completely true, at least in this case.
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that tool was specific for the controller contained in the stick
This is the Key phrase.
This really in not much different than the way U3 works.
The ability is built into the drive, not Windows.
The hardware/firmware/controller/whatever is giving misleading information to Windows about what it is, so ...
stories about Windows not supporting partitioned USB sticks is, eh, not completely true
is, eh, not completely true
I doubt that a generic app could be written to do this to just any drive.
Tim
Things have got to get better, they can't get worse, or can they?
I guess my point is: the specific app partitiones the drive, something windows dont do. I doubt this is a firmware thing... I could partition any USB stick using Linux. The thing is, if I would do that maybe the 2 partitions show up in windows XP as well. Remember, I needed a special driver for Windows 2000 so i assumed Windows XP would also need a special driver installed. This was not the case so that made me think of the possibility of Partitioned USB sticks. (I'll see if I can partition another brand.)
Windows does not allow multi-partitioning of
"Removable" drives or support mounting of more than
the first partition. You can either find a tool that
changes the RMB set in the controller or you can use a
filter-driver.
Linux doesn't care about the RMB but that wont help if you want to mount multiple partitions on a windows-box,the drive must be seen as "Fixed" by windows .