Hi,

I've written a Centos 7 on a usb stick with Rufus. On Mac OS and on Windows I can only see a 6MB partition the label of which says "ANACONDA". The usb stick works all right, I have already installed Centos from it. The question is, why does this happen? Why can't I see the bigger partition?

I'm not sure why you can't see the bigger partition but you can use the command fdisk -l (small letter L) while you have Centos up and running to view all partitions.

Maybe there is something proprietary on your Mac that prevents you from seeing the partition because Mac doesn't recognize it. (guessing)

The 6 MB partition is labeled ANACONDA?

-::-Anaconda is the installer for Centos so I find that odd.-::-

Out of interest, I also encountered this same "problem" when I installed a Debian and CentOS installers on my USB stick. I can't find the technical explanation why my Windows (8.1) can only recognize a small partition of the USB stick, but it appears that it's the case with USB devices which have Linux installers on them.

When you format the drive (still using Windows), you will still get the small size. You still need to plug it to your Linux machine and fdisk to wipe it clean so you can see the whole USB disk size in Windows.

There's nothing proprietary on the mac that could interfere. On Windows disk manangement it says that the partition is unallocated. As I was saying, given that the Centos works, I don't have a problem with it, I would just like to understand why this is happening.

On the other hand, I would like to still use the usb for copying files while still being bootable. That wouldn't hurt.

Which partition are you referring to that says it's 'unallocated'?

W/O seeing all of the partitions on your machine it's hard to visualize.

If you would list all of the partitions on your machine I could tell you what is going on and perhaps why to your question.

Hybrid images contain their own master boot record so the entire flash drive is overwritten including the partition table. Therefore the drive will appear to be smaller than its actual size. As stated if you delete and recreate the partition table then format the drive it will be back to "normal".

Windows won't see any partition except the first on a flash drive, at least a standard install of windows. There may be some convoluted way around this some windows user could explain. It doesn't matter what filesystem the second/third, etc. partition are, windows or other. Check the links below. With a standard drive attached by usb port, windows will show all partitions.

http://www.sevenforums.com/general-d...s-windows.html

http://superuser.com/questions/43653...ive-in-windows

Some suggestions at the windows 10 forum you might try.

http://www.tenforums.com/drivers-har...ash-drive.html

Microsoft dose not and will never support partition formats that they DO NOT OWN

the ect4,lvm,ext3,... partitions can NOT be seen by windows

Because Microsoft WILL NOT support it

Thanks for making that clear.

Thank you all for your answers. You've offered a lot of ideas. I inserted the stick into a Cent OS computer. When I run fdisk -l, the two partitions show up twice, once as /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdb2, and secondly as /dev/sdb1p1 and /dev/sdb1p2 respectively.

The first partition, which is the big "missing" one is "Empty". This is what it says under the "System" column. For the second one, it says EFI (FAT-12/16/32). So I probably wrote the disk using the UEFI option. So what is happening exactly, why is this happening? Does anyone know?

Take a look at the link below to see if that helps.

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/red...artitions.html

I've written an isohybrid image of several distributions. All appear to have a small partition and a larger EFI partition. That's just the way the partition table looks. However, from Linux, other partitions can be added with fdisk. It's probably because the bootloader is in that region of the disk.