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[ILikePie]

I recently purchased an 8GB SanDisk USB drive. I split the drive into two partitions, the first, a 2GB vfat partition, and the second, a 5.5GB btrfs partition (apparently it was only 8,000,000,000 bytes). At first I could clearly see the vfat partition under Windows, but I couldn't see btrfs one (Windows tends to show only the first partition on your disk, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't support btrfs anyway.).
After about week of constant use I tried mounting the drive under Windows again and I can't see either of the two partitions (I get the old "format device" screen). Is there a way to fix this, or maybe a way to force Windows to mount the partition?

(I'm using Windows XP Home Edition by the way)

[Stargrasper]

Rule of thumb, you generally shouldn't partition flash drives.  And yes, Windows will refuse to mount any but the first partition on removable media.  Also, I believe Windows will really only play nicely with filesystems formatted as something in the FAT family or NTFS.

Right now, I'm not sure if the problem is Windows or the drive.  Does a system reboot make it work?  Does the drive mount in a different usb port?  Does the drive mount on any other computer?  Forcing it to mount (assuming it isn't corrupt or otherwise damaged) should be possible, but I only know off-hand how to do that on Linux.  I'll look into it later on.  In general, if it's possible to mount, Windows will mount it as soon as it's detected.

You could try to find some sort of disk management utility.  From there, if it's possible to mount, you should be able to.  Or at least reformat the thing in a specific way...

Windows is pretty picky about abandoning devices with the slightest inconsistency or damage.  It's not unheard of for usb drives to randomly die.

[ILikePie]

Sorry for disappearing like that. I tried inserting the drive again today and strangely enough, it mounts. Windows baffles me sometimes.