I have a 16GB Corsair Survivor flash drive that I have partitioned into three parts. The first partition (4.3 GB) contains the Ubuntu 11.10 live USB distro in which I used a USB tool to create. The second partition is a (6.7 GB) storage ext3, and the third partion is the remainder as a linux swap partition. The OS works fine but the other partitions are not usable. When I open my /etc/fstab there are no drives listed only

overlayfs / overlayfs rw 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nosuid,nodev 0 0

Moreover, the I did mount both partitions by going typing "sudo mount -a" in my terminal and fdisk -l listed them all. But I still cannot write to the ext3 partition and I cannot even find the swap partition.

So my question is how can I utilize the other two partitions. I have dropbox installed in my /home folder but I cannot sync the entire dropbox folder because there is not enough space. The dropbox folder is 6 GB and the casper-rw file(persistence) is only 4 GB, which cannot be increased because the file system is fat32. I want to move my /home folder to the ext3 and utilize the swap partition to improve system performance.

Usually that is one of the drawbacks to using a live sort of install to usb. Some distro's just don't let you easily mount the usb as a device. For lack of a better explanation the system thinks the usb drive is the cd drive.
At least that is what I have tended to see.

Since it is so big why not put it back to a single drive and do a normal type install? I do fine 8G. Some usb's just don't work as good as a real hard drive. I have no idea why either.

Just a thought -- if you can install from the live CD, why not simply install, creating the /storage partition in the process?

Usb drives do seem to be picky creatures -- you may have better luck with an SD card.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/create-...per-partition/

Do remember that USB 2.0 is only 480mb/s so your really not going to see any improvement with swap.

Thank you everyone for your input. After a few tries to run a full desktop version directly from my USB and after considering michealk resonse; I decided the best solution is to maintain a live version on the USB and create a persistent drive as opposed to a casper-rw file.

Thank you for that link Michael. I actually saw that post earlier but wanted to try to have a swap partition.
I do not understand how the swap partition works; but, understandably 480 mbps is the fastest my usb 2.0 goes. So, that would at least to some degree reduce the benefit of a swap partition.

That will work good for many things. Just don't try to do any updates that require changes to the original squash filesystem.