iso-hybrid thumb drives and Windows

[juergen.fiedler@gmail.com]

Hello,

I created my first iso-hybrid image today and was very impressed. I really love the idea of one image that you can use on both CD's and thumb drives.

One thing is still puzzling me: Is there any way to write a hybrid image to a thumb drive, and prepare the rest of the drive in such a way that it can be used from Windows? I am exchanging files with Windows machines off the network a lot, and it would be convenient not to need two drives.

I can easily create a partition in the remaining space of the thumb drive and use it from Linux, but no matter how I format the second partition, Windows will claim that the whole drive is unformatted.

With normal usb-hdd images, my workaround is to loop mount the image and copy the contents onto a thumb drive that only contains one large FAT partition, but it looks like I can't just copy the contents of the hybrid ISO to the thumbdrive the same way.

I can live with the drive in question only being accessible from Linux. Still, if someone had any idea how to work around this, I would be even happier.


Thanks,
 ~Juergen