0
First, from time to time I need to transfer data between arbitrary computers with Windows 7 or later (and, in seldom cases, from/to Mac). I prefer to use a USB drive with a FAT32 partition for this purpose. Second, I boot Debian live from external media every once in a while. For this purpose, given a completely free USB stick, I typically dd
an image from http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current-live/amd64/iso-hybrid/, but I'm ready to change this way of creating live partitions.
How to achieve both goals using the same USB pen drive? (Yes, I know that persistence is not enough: both the FAT32 partition on the drive has to be usable under Windows, and the Debian live has to be bootable. Yes, I've tried Unetbootin; it didn't produce a bootable pendrive; don't ask me why, I have no idea.)
The problem you face here is that Windows responds very badly to USB drives with multiple partitions.What I use to do was backup partitions to a file, delete all but one partition and then load the backup but only onto the end of disk GPT backup. THen later I can just do restore from backup in gdisk to get the other partitions back. But this is a horrible work around and the only reason I did it was because it was a 64GB stick that I used for all versions of windows and linux for recovery. Thanks to these windows limitations its far easier to just use separate USB drives. – jdwolf – 2017-11-18T03:18:43.380
It's pretty involved but the live isos for the most part SHOULD support loopback mounting meaning that you can run them live as an iso file instead of writing the iso into a partition. If you like that method I'll write up an answer for it? – jdwolf – 2017-11-18T03:20:59.390
Yes I've tried this plenty and it works. Just haven't done it recently and I know for some distributions that aren't debian it does not work. – jdwolf – 2017-11-18T17:26:22.877