0

So, I decided to make a bootable Kali flash drive and made a persistence partition and still had about 5gb left of unallocated space. I tried to create a ntf and FAT partition in this space in the end with GDeparted however Windows still won't have it. I even tried to create a primary partition using diskpart but it said it can't create a primary partition on a non-empty removable drive. The only thing that windows will do with the drive at all is say that the small FAT partition that was created during the boot drive creation is RAW. It keeps on wanting to format it but I'm pretty sure that it's used for the boot process. How can I get Windows to recognize this last bit of open spot and create a partition and use it?

BobserLuck
  • 138
  • I may be wrong but I recall my experience with Windows – ye olde XP, I think – not recognizing multiple partitions on a removable drive. I suspect it can only see the first partition (or a superfloppy). I don't know if it's the same story with newer Win OSes though. – Kamil Maciorowski Mar 18 '17 at 08:46
  • I heard something similar to this too. Know of a good way to move partitions down the storage to make room for a new partition in the front but without deleting or resizing them? I've used the persistent part of it but I wouldn't want to screw that up. Also, know if it's possible to completely copy a partition to another drive temporarily and then copy it back without flaw? – BobserLuck Mar 18 '17 at 08:49

1 Answers1

2

Windows will recognize only the first partition on a removable disk. Thus, if you want to partition a removable disk and use it with Windows, you must be sure that the first partition is the one that Windows will use. Later partitions can be used by Linux or other OSes, including to boot those OSes.

I'm afraid I can't provide step-by-step instructions for how to set this up, though, since I've never attempted to do this. You may be able to adapt whatever instructions you used to prepare the disk so that the shared FAT or NTFS partition is the first one, though.

Rod Smith
  • 21,765
  • Alright, I was afraid of that. I'll go ahead and re-partition the disk and see if I can put the a boot on it and see if it works. – BobserLuck Mar 19 '17 at 04:31
  • Yep, that was it. I had to partition it with a NTFS at the start and then add a FAT32 with a boot flag after. Then I started up an ubuntu live virtual box and used the start up disk creator with the kali file and pointed it to /dev/sdb2 and it works perfectly. – BobserLuck Mar 23 '17 at 16:33