Partition Problem

[Michael]

Hello everyone!

A friend has some form of flash memory stick which is 4GB in size, formatted in FAT32. He said the device he wants to plug it into only supports FAT16. Of course the size limitation of FAT16 is 2GB, so he'd have to have two partitions...

Initially I thought Partition Magic would allow him to do this, but Partition Magic doesn't appear to support flash drives, despite the drive being visible in Explorer. I then found an application called Partition Manager which allowed me to destroy the partition, create two partitions and format them in FAT16. The problem (interestingly) is that Partition 0 and Partition 1 (on the memory stick) are formatted and made active yet it doesn't work as it should! The two partitions are visible under Computer Management > Disk Management in XP, but neither partitions (drives) appear in Explorer.

It sounds ridiculous as any flash memory stick is supposed to act like a hard drive, yet we can all happily partition hard drives, but clearly not memory sticks! Is there a reason for this?
The only workable solution (I thought) was to create one partition consisting of 2GB formatted in FAT16, but losing the other 2GB (unfortunately), but this doesn't work either! Windows clearly doesn't like users messing with partitions on memory sticks. Is this the same for Zip disks out of curiosity?

[StewartKnight]

the way I undersand it, you can have a 4gb stick, but the maximum size of a single file is 2gb

[kevinmcaleer]

What device only supports Fat16? I would have thought it was likely that anything that didn't understand Fat32 was probably to old to understand USB! Plus the memory stick defacto standard is Fat32.

Having said that, I would have thought you could do this kind of thing. I formated a floppy disk as NTFS once to see if you could. You could but the FAT was as big as the whole disk!

I googled it but nothing relevant came up right away.

-Kev

[indie]

You could try something like Acronis Partition Manager?

[Michael]

Just to clarify it isn't a USB flash memory stick, but some form of flash memory card. I've tried to replicate the problem with an old 64MB USB stick I have, partitioning it into two but it doesn't work!

The card I believe acts in the same manner as a memory stick however - plug it into the PC and it gives itself a drive letter to drag and drop files onto. To be honest I don't think the file system is the limitation, but more likely the device (whatever it is) only supports a max 2GB. Of course formatting a 2GB partition in FAT32 makes no difference at all.

I think the easiest solution would be for him to buy a native 2GB flash card so there should be no compatability issues. What I thought would be a simple task is becoming frustrating, but I appreciate the feedback Makes my mind boggle though as to why partitioning a memory stick isn't straight forward? I can only put it down to design I suppose.

[tarquel]

take a low-res photo of it for us to see hehe

Someone else might recognise it and suggest something then

Nath.