Partitioning a USB Flash drive?

[Squirrel448]

Quick question: Is it possible to format any ol' USB Flash drive into multiple partitions? I'd been surfing around and seeing flash drives that come with their own partitioning utilities. I just bought this, just wondering if I can format it into multiple partitions, and if you have any recommended software to go about this (supposing it's possible). I just don't want to totally wreck this by formatting it and finding out that I can't just delete the partitions and reformat it back to 1gb again.

Diskmgmt.msc on WinXP has the delete/create partition options greyed out for this device.

 

[RealBlackStuff]

Those USB-keys are best left alone. Dont try fdisk/partition/format & co on them, chances are you wreck the thing!
It's just as easy to create a few sub-directories and store whatever you want in there.
If you have money to burn, then of course go ahead, but the risk is not worth it.
Buy 2 or 3 smaller keys if that suits your purpose better.

 

[Nodsu]

A disk is a disk is a disk. Everything you can do to a real hard drive can be done to a USB flash drive. Partitions are plain data just like files and there is no magic to it.

If you somehow manage to confuse Windows, then you can use a decent OS (anything modern that is not Windows ) to wipe the thing clean and start over.

 

[Jimbo420]

In theory I you should be able to do anything with them like Nodsu said, but then I have seen some that have been messed up and then were worthless and couldn't be used again after trying to do things to them like RBS was talking about. There was one that I actually wreck by just simiply formatting it.

Flash drives just don't quite work the same as regular disk drives. The only disk utility I would every use on one was disk defragmentor.