Creating a multi purpose thumb drive: best practice

I have a 64 GB (USB 3.0) thumb drive which I would like to seperate in three different parts.

1. A section for a bootable XUbuntu image.
2. A 10 GB section (ext4 formatted).
3. A ~50 GB section (fat32 formatted).

Usually I just type

dd if=/home/<user>/Downloads/<distro>.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

in order to create a bootable thumb drive.

I then tried using fdisk to add additional partitions as described above.

I was able to boot into the live image but could not mount neither the ext4 not the fat32 partitions (error message said it was busy).

Then I tried using fdisk to create three partitions and typing:

dd if=/home/<user>/Downloads/<distro>.iso of=/dev/sdb1 bs=1M

with sdb1 beeing the first roughly 1,5 GB partition.

I was able to boot into the live image again. But only on some machines. Windows however didn't recognized the fat32 partition.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in regards.

Markus

1 Answer

Mkusb

Mkusb makes a persistent flash drive with FAT32 boot partition, ISO9660 read only OS partition, ext2 casper-rw persistence partition and NTFS data partition accessible to Linux and Windows.

The drive will boot BIOS and UEFI.

The drive is easy to hack into a multibooter or Full install drive among other mods.