I’ve reminded people before how important it is to back up your data. Personally, I use Clonezilla for whole-disk or whole-partition backups periodically, in addition to my daily data backups. It’s pretty easy to use, and it gives you a lot of options as to how to store your data. For backing up my laptop, I had been using the save to SMB server option, which is sllllooooowwwww over your standard 802.11g network. So to speed things up, I bought a 128GB USB drive, which I would partition with a tiny Clonezilla boot partition, and my data partition for backups (it is temporary storage only, I have several backup locations I use, but backing up to USB and sneakernet is far faster than backing up over wireless by a factor of about ten).
Sadly, though, I quickly learned that Windows does not allow you to put multiple partitions on USB drives. Linux will happily do so, but Windows will only see the first partition you set up. This left me in a bit of a quandary: how do I get this to work so I can pull data off of the USB stick in Windows?
I tried a lot of things: The Hitatchi Microdrive cfadisk.sys I could never get to work. Dummydisk.sys prevented Windows from booting at all since I have the 64-bit version of Windows 7 (thankfully Last Known Good Configuration works well to fix these driver snafus). Eventually, though, I came across a solution that works:
1. In Linux, use gparted to create two partitions: a giant DATA primary partition taking all but 256MB of space on the USB drive, and a second BOOT primary partition using that last 256MB. Make both partitions FAT32.
2. Follow the manual instructions for setting up Clonezilla on a USB drive in Linux (Tuxboot didn’t work for me for some reason). Specifically, install it to that tiny 256MB partition and make that partition the boot partition using makeboot.sh.
3. Boot from USB, and save your data to the giant DATA partition, which will usually be /dev/sdb1 in Clonezilla.
Windows will see the first Primary partition, which means it can access that DATA partition to copy those backup files wherever you want.. The limitation is that you can’t edit the BOOT partition from Windows, but you should have a Linux Live CD available if you want to do that. It works well enough.
But I’d be remiss if I didn’t make a plea to Microsoft: enable multiple partitions on USB drives! This is yet another thing that grown-up OSes can do, and the fact that Windows still doesn’t allow this is incredibly disappointing. It’s not as if this would be mandatory: just give us the option. Please. So we don’t have to muck around with these hacks anymore.