Confessions of a cat

Nowadays you can buy huge usb drives / sd(hc) cards on the market. 16gb sd cards are selling around USD 30-40 right now - and I imagine it’s the same for usb drives. The theoretical max. of an sdhc card is 32 gb which is enough for a lot of purposes.

Lots of laptop and consumer devices have an sd card slot as well. If you use one such card / usb drive for your computer you might want to partition it for several reasons (just imagine dual booting linux / windows from an sd card - possible! see my previous post on how to make xp boot from an usb drive - it’s very much the same with an sd card as well).

So to the point. The problem with windows (xp) is that if it recognizes a device that is connected as removable (usb hard drive, sd card, etc.) then it will only allow you to format / have one partition on it. This is enough for a lot of users (e.g you use the card in your camera).

Windows also does not allow you to see more than one partition from a removable drive - even if you have partitioned it to 2 or more sections with linux (gparted) or mac os x ( via the built in disk utility).

The problem is that windows only allocates a drive letter to the first partition found on a removable drive - and the rest is just not accessible.

How to solve this problem?

The answer is simple:

You need windows to recognize removable hard drives as local drives. Then all the partitions will be accessible for you.

Grab this zip file, and in it you will find the pdf description and the necessary files required to enable your windows install:

usb_drive_as_local_drive_windows

URL of original article (where the pdf printout is saved from):

http://portableapps.com/node/7181

Have fun!