Settings for Flash Drive

From what I know, ntfs is not a plug and play and unplug. It is a plug and play shutdown and unplug. That might be your problem, meaning that the flash drive is not "closing." Fat32 is a plug and play and unplug.

Aren't partitions on a USB drive generally a bad idea though? I thought I'd read here and other places that you will most likely run into a lot of problems. So it's a bit like saying that you can attach a Rolls Royce jet engine to your Jeep Wrangler. Sure, you can, but it's probably not advisable.

Granted, I haven't read the article, and saying that something is not possible is different from saying it's not advisable. Still, in practical terms it doesn't seem to be possible.

Anyway... more fuel for the fire?

but what for?

I dont know any generic operating system which will properly read partitioned stick, whereby I mean partitoned same way as other drives , e.g. hard drives. One drive, partition table containing more then one entry.
This is the reason also why many partitioning tools will refuse to do such operation.
In fact I have managed one day to produce two partitons on one stick within one drive under linux, but when tried to use it later on other linux distro, the stick was either not partitioned at all or only first partition was read.

So far I also never met any commercial product using two partitons on one drive on a usb flash stick.

This all has not be confused with the way it is done by number of manufacturers of sticks. There you have defined *two separate drives* each one containing one partition only, that means one partition table in each separate faked drive containing only one partition.

This is by the way also the trick U3 and similar are doing, they define two drives, so everybody can read it without problems.

So some people try to make their stick 'not removable' by some tricks as flipping the removable bit. But this is seldom possible, the description of the device is stored in the controller eprom, difficult to change it from outside. Uwe Sieber describes also some way to overcome this problems by the use of special driver, just go through his website, you will find the instruction for it and understandable explanation why this all is so problematic.
There seem even to exist some preformated external hard drives that have the removable flag set and such devices are also difficult to be repartitioned if the flag is hard set.

Obviously standard hard drive with usb interface will not have this problems.