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I want to partition a 64Gb USB 3.0 drive to have a full ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS installation in one 48Gb ext2 partition and a common NTFS partition with 16Gb to be accessed by windows and ubuntu without needing to boot from it. Is this possible? Because I am having a lot of trouble getting it to work.

I am at a point where I can successfully install ubuntu in the first partition, format the second one also in ext2, boot into a second ubuntu installation and reformat the second partition of the first USB drive in NTFS using GParted. The NTFS partition is seen by ubuntu and the drive boots, but the problem is that windows cannot see it. Do you have some clues of why this happens or what I may be doing wrong? Windows only sees the main partition and naturally cannot access it as it is not FAT32 or NTFS.

Another thing: I want to use NTFS and not FAT32 because I want to be able to transfer files in that partition that are larger than 4Gb.

I have been searching for a couple of days and I would like to give insight of what I understood and have been following:

  1. A full Ubuntu installation is faster to boot than a live one and allows easy "persistence" over 4Gb without fidgeting with casper-rw labelled partitions that I couldn't get to work properly (maybe my fault, maybe the hardware's)

  2. For a full Ubuntu installation in a USB thumbdrive we have to use a live installation using a Live CD or a second USB drive and choose "Install Ubuntu" at the first screen to proceed to the installation in the first USB drive.

  3. A swap partition isn't needed in systems that have enough RAM for the applications they run (my case, my desktop has 4Gb RAM, my laptop 16Gb).

  4. At the install screen, we should choose the entire drive instead of the boot partition for the location of the bootloader, otherwise bad stuff may happen (I didn't understand why that may be).

  5. It is better to replace the usual ext4 partitions with ext2, as this type of partition doesn't use a journaling system. If I understood correctly, that is because unlike a hard disk drive, a solid state drive has access times that do not depend on physical data location, so in this case it doesn't need a journaling system.

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I found the problem!!

I was partitioning (logically in my opinion) with the first partition in the USB drive as ext2 and the second one as NTFS. Turns out... windows doesn't deal well with this.

WINDOWS ONLY DETECTS THE FIRST PARTITION!!! (I don't know why).

Source (CTRL+F for bodhi.zazen): http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1719346

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