Life, Tech, Vet and time…..

At the outset I am going to state that using the standard windows (xp) removable drive drivers, you cannot partition a USB drive.  It just is not supported, you can reformat the drive to NTFS (for security) with a bit of tweaking, but you cant create multiple partitions.

So I found this simple trick to make windows see a USB as a fixed drive and allow multiple volumes and partition resizing.    You will need admin privileges for the system.

The first step in this process is to plug in the USB drive making sure it contains no critical files and just to be sure format it as Fat32 using the standard windows methodology.

Now determining the USB drives HID.  or Hardware ID, you are going to need this to tweak the install file for the new drivers.  To do this there are a number of methods. The easiest I have found is to open “Device Manager” .  Click the view menu and select “View by connection”. Now open the drop down lists below (the names may vary depending on youy system) until you find the PCI to USB Controllers (there may be more than one) open each in turn and until you see the name of the USB drive you have connected listed.  Below that should be “Generic Volume” Right click and select properties. Then select the details tab and in the “Property” drop down list select “Device Instance ID” – copy the displayed value to a notepad.

Alternatively if this does not work look in the registry under

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\USBSTOR

find your Drive and copy the key using everything after enum eg:

USBSTOR\DiskBUFFALO_USB_Flash_Disk__2.00

Cool you now have the device id.  Now you need to use it to edit the install (inf) file for the new driver.

I used the following driver “Hitachi Microdrive” Download it and save it to your desktop and extract the files to desktop.

One of the extracted files is called CFADISK.inf

Open it with your favorite text-editor I prefer Notepad++ found here.

Now find the section entitled [cfadisk_device]

Within that section you will find lines of text like this:

%Microdrive_devdesc% = cfadisk_install,IDE\DiskIBM-DSCM-11000__________________________SC2IC801

Basically what you need to do is comment out all (in this section) of them except one, the first one, place a “;” at the start of each line you wish to comment out.  In the first line replace anything after the “%Microdrive_devdesc% = cfadisk_install, “ with your Device Instance ID.  Now save the file.

Now you need to update the driver for your usb drive with your modified driver.  Go back to your Device manager and select the Generic Volume you found before (make sure its the right one) and chose “Update driver” from the driver tab.

On the first screen select “Not at this Time”

Second screen Select “Install from a Specific Location(advanced)

Third Select Dont search I will Choose the driver

Finally select “Have Disk”

Then Browse and chose the folder you saved the driver and install file you just updated in.

If you changed the ID correctly it should show you the a driver.

I have this working under XP but not under Windows 2003 I have yet to find a driver that 2003 will allow.

Keep in mind you need to install the driver on every system you wish to access anything above the first partition.  SO what I did is this

Created the first and largest partition as FAT32 I then created a Secure NTFS partition after this… This partition is not accessible unless I install the driver which I keep in the primary partition.  (copy it to desktop before you try and install it)

Good luck

Extra details here

http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/thread-2213125.php

benjiC System Management USB Partitioning, winxp, xp