I wanted to create 3 or more partitions on a usb drive. Never mind why :-), the question is really about what I think I discovered concerning MS Windows and GNU/Linux tools for doing disk formatting.
My test usb drive is (nominally) 16GB. I used Linux fdisk to create 2 primary partitions (in Linux-oriented phrasing, /dev/sdc1 and /dev/sdc2). In addition I created an extended partition and 1 logical drive (partition) within that.
I then checked and tweaked the layout by using gparted and finished preparing the drive on Linux at that time. Unplugged the drive and plugged it into my Windows 7 box. The first time around, I got a modal Windows Explorer shell dialog open up: it told me that the drive was not ready to use, and needed to be formatted first. I let it go ahead and do that. It formatted the first partition for me. I am pretty sure I had to have the Linux partitioning tools put a "Linux ext3" code on that partition (not NTFS). If so, Windows ignored the "partition type" indicated in the disk partition table.
I put the drive back on the Linux box and checked the layout again. I did not like the layout, and formatted again. I decided to make the first 2 partitions have the type "NTFS" and the 3rd have the type "Linux ext3".
After finishing with the re-partitioning, I unplugged from the Linux box and reinserted into the Windows 7 box. Using an Administrator (elevated rights) cli session, I ran the diskpart command and used that to format the first partition as the exFAT filesystem. When it succeeded, I tried to repeat the operation on the second partition. That is where the anomalous behavior that prompts the question comes in. diskpart shows the numbers of partitions following the newly-formatted first partition as "partition 0". All of them. And they cannot be selected for formatting. They can be seen using the command "list partition", but not formatted.
So. Is it a known limitation that the MS Windows diskpart tool can only handle the creation of one (exFAT/NTFS/etc.) Windows-type partition on a usb drive? Or can / will only operate on the first partition encountered on that drive?
I ought to add, finally, that I intend to keep experimenting, and see if the use of other partition "tricks" allows me to get around this (apparent) limitation.
