Ok what i'd really like to do is take my 1GB USB drive and partition it into two 512 drives. one fat32 and one ext3. The main reason i want to do this is so i can have a persistent Ubuntu live session (ubuntu 7.10) and i've read on their wiki that it's only possible with ext3, but i want to still be able to use the USB in a windows environment. there are some things out there that would let me view ext3 in windows but none of them mention support for USB drives, can someone shed some light? Thanks.

As I recall you can separate a USB pen drive into more than one partition. However, Windows (and possibly other simple OS's) will think the drive is unformatted unless the first partition is FAT. Even then it will only mount the first partition, even if there are other partitions on there.

You can put Grub on the MBR of the usb drive, install a kernel to the second partition (which will be ext3) and leave the first partition free as a general data storage drive. You should be able to then boot the USB drive.

However (and I could be wrong here) I would have thought you'd need more than 512 meg to install Ubuntu.

A USB pen drive can be formatted exactly the same way as a hard disk.

Ext2 is recommended because the intensive journaling activities can shorten the life of the pen drive.

I tried ubuntu live plus various other installs (from pendrivelinux.com). I had quite a few teething problems and never really got off the ground.

For me, "puppy linux" worked well. www.puppylinux.org

Downloaded the ISO, burn to CD and booted. I simply paritioned the [pendrive]"disk" into 2 and installed puppy into the 1st. Puppy actually is designed to run in memory or from a pendrive. Went without a hitch.

If you MUST have ubuntu, expect some work to do!!

This is a general method of putting any iso and make it bootable in a USB. The Linux will always boot but the distro may not run if its installer has been written to fetch the system files from a CDrom.

One can put several distros into a pen drive too.

Thanks everyone for all the help i really appreciate it. I just went to pendrivelinux and found their 7.10 persistent USB install guide. it was really easy even for a noob like me. I'm probably going to get a 4GB USB drive though and do the process again. Thanks again!



UPDATE: i got ubuntu installed just fine on my USB drive, but the persistence doesn't seem to be working. i'll try a few more things and maybe i'll try puppylinux. all i really want is a live distro (maybe that i can install on my USB) that i can save my settings for and use wireless without a huge headache. I'll keep you informed.

UPDATE2: ok the process on pendrivelinux does work for persistence but they lesft something out. When you boot into linux there is a new menu item to chose, something about booting USB in persistent mode. For me that mode did not work, at all. however going to the normal live boot, hiting f6 (i think it's f6 it's the "other options" one) and at the end hitting SPACE and putting in persistent and booting that way worked perfectly. I'm def going to get a 4GB jump and redoing the process. Happy Hacking!