I will go straight to the step by step instructions and put the so-called theoretical information towards the end of this page, so that people who are only interested in getting it done can get straight into it

I have done this a lot of time on Linux, but I recently discovered that I may be able to do it on Windows as well - so I may insert something on that later.

Tools needed (mostly available by default on all major Linux distro):

• fdisk - for partitioning (recommended for USB drives with >4GB storage)
• mkfs - for preparing filesystem (go for something specific e.g. mkdosfs for FAT filesystem)

in progress…

coming soon…

1. talk about CHS and LBA

Information on MBR and GPT partitioning schemes.

Creating 2GB partition at the end of the drive

• for 512-bytes sector size, allocate 2x1024x1024x1024/512=4194304 sectors
  • subtract this value from total sector
  • make sure the end value of previous partition ends on resulting value

Case study 1

For 16GB devices (~14GB+2GB), when making the second partition as active partition, installing syslinux onto that partition is still okay. But when doing similar config on 32GB devices, syslinux fails. Why?