Question

I’ve searched Google for hours, but I can’t find the answer anywhere.
I have an 8GB flash drive, and I want to install Chromium OS on it.
However, I would only need about 4GB of storage for Chromium OS. Allocating the other 4GB of space for Chromium OS seems like a waste to me.

I wanted to know if it was possible for me to partition the flash drive into two 4GB partitions, with one partition being the bootable Chromium OS and the other being a normal FAT32 file system.

If this is possible, can any of you kindly point me in the right direction as to how to accomplish this?

I run Ubuntu Linux 11.04 x86_64, but I can boot into my Windows 7 partition if needed.

Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks!

Answer 1

It is indeed possible to re-partition a flash drive. If you are already running Linux, you should be able to delete the existing partition table and create a new one using fdisk. I have done this on several occasions, although I have never tried it on a drive that large.

You can read more about partitioning with fdisk here. Remember that you have to run fdisk on the raw device (not on a partition), and that you must unmount any filesystems on the drive prior to re-partitioning it. For example, you would use fdisk /dev/sdb, not fdisk /dev/sdb1. Once you’re created your partitions, you can create a filesystem using mkfs and then mount them with mount.

One warning, though. Windows will treat the flash drive as if it has a single partition (I believe it only sees the first one). Linux will see all partitions. I’m not sure how Chromium would handle this, but be aware that different OSes may not support it.