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I have an 8gb USB stick with Lubuntu 18.04 installed on it. It was created with mkusb and has persistent storage filling up maximum possible area. At some point I needed more persistent storage capacity, so I'm trying to clone the entire installation to a larger stick, using this instruction.

While the "dus" part of that answer completes nicely, resulting in a bootable 1-to-1 copy on the new stick, the "gparted" part later on gives me some trouble.

The partition layout of my original stick contains a small partition /dev/sdb1 situated at the end, flagged "msftdata". In order to resize the casper-rw one, I guess I need to move this one to the end of the new stick also, so that casper has the room to grow. The problem is, gparted seems to have some issues with this little partition and refuses to move it on the new stick. Deleting it seems to be the only way gparted is able to touch it.

My question is, what is this small partition all about, what does it do, why is it there, what can I break by deleting it?

In fact I did some experimentation with deleting it on the new stick, then growing casper to a suitable size. The clone still boots, all seems normal, but I'm wondering if I'm facing any risks later on after removing this little guy.

Here's some details from gparted concerning the partition in question.

Jan Wychowaniak
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1 Answers1

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NTFS Partition

Mkusb partition 1 is a NTFS partition that allows both Linux and Windows to store data on the USB stick. (Thus the name usbdata)

If the USB stick also needs to communicate with Apple hardware this partition can be reformatted to FAT32.

If you haven't used this partition then it is safe to delete it and stretch partition 5, casper-rw to the size you like.

After clicking Apply All Operations, you can right click the empty space to create a New NTFS or FAT32 partition, (if desired).

C.S.Cameron
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