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I created two partitions on my removable Flash drive, but Windows doesn't recognize the second partition.

Both partitions are NTFS and primary partitions.

And this image is in disk management on Windows 7.

enter image description here

and also with EASEUS Partition Master

enter image description here

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  • please paste screen from disk manager Mar 26, 2012 at 20:00
  • pictures in disk management and in EASEUS Partition Master has added
    – Hamed
    Mar 26, 2012 at 20:24

3 Answers 3

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Windows does not support multiple partitions on removable flash drives. The drive must be either non-removable or non-flash.

The Web describes various methods how to make removable flash drives work, but in general case you are better off using a non-flash medium for this (like a USB HDD/USB SSD).

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    Why doesn't Windows support this?
    – Jazz
    Oct 23, 2013 at 20:42
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    Honestly, I have no idea. :)
    – minya
    Oct 27, 2013 at 7:03
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    Works on my Windows 10 machine, seems like they've expanded support. Still nothing on Win 7, though Oct 25, 2018 at 12:02
  • @Jazz: might be because they thought multiple pop-in messages would be annoying and this isn't a common use case. Jan 14 at 4:01
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I met the same issue with two different USB keys on both Windows 7 and XP. I can confirm minya's bit of information.

I checked if it works with a partition type 'HIDDEN' for the first partition, but nope: even then only the so-called "hidden" partition is usable under both Windows versions (DISK management tool shows all partitions but does not read the filesystem of partition #2 and more).

There's a solution for 32 bit versions of this limitative OS, though: Enabling Multiple Partitions on Removable USB Storage

EDIT: Here is a tool that do the job in seconds (32/64-bit Windows OS, GPL): RMPrepUSB. In their tutorial, point « 4a. Use RMPrepUSB » alone does the job well. If you know how to swap partitions viewed by Windows under *nix please share it :)

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Have you looked in disk management? Perhaps checked that both have a drive letter assigned to them?
It could be that the drive letter on the second partition conflicts with an existing drive in your system.
We ran into that problem on some XP machines where we had to change the drive letter of some USB drives, never seen it on Win7 though.

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