he designed the tool for primarily deleting locked files but it is superb at unlocking USB drives that Windows refuses to "Safely Eject", too often I used to either shutdown a running PC just to remove a drive or had to risk and yank a live running thumbdrive hopeing I didn't just ryuin it or my data.
The author's French, I suppose there are worse things you can say about a guy but his site has changed hosting providers and in case that link goes stale, search for Cedrick Collomb's Unlocker since spyware laced imitations have been released.
Reading the thread, it seems you want to dual / multipurpose a removable USB drive for LINUX and Windows, and yes it can be done absolutely and in the manner you want.
And you can always download an ext2file system driver for mounting UNIX/Linux drives for immediate results:
http://www.fs-driver.org/download.html
Or, if you still need to partition a removable drive, download the freely available cfadisk.sys driver made by Hitachi.
I don't think Hitachi still "supports" it, updates it or even hosts It but it is the effective solution and without tampering with removable hex identifying bits that seems to invoke warning and fear from so many naysayers who obviously haven't tried the method themselves.
You'll need GPARTed from to resize and split you USB drive and that will be include in your installed LINUX distro or obtained with package manager, in case you aren't installing Linux but just wanted to split the disk up for whatever reason and use with Windows, YES YOU CAN and search the web for "gparted LIVE boot CD" and various sites with the latest version will render the tool.
The Caveats:
Every windows system will recognize at least one of the drives partitions and reliably read the data but whether it detects the first, second or other partition seems to vary based on the version of windows and manufacturer of computer, thus it is important to copy the cfadisk.sys and modified cfadisk.inf to every partition on the drive ensuring the new computer can access the driver for installation and full access. The great news is you only have to modify the INF once since it carries the USB drives unique hardware type that is the same across all windows computers.
Other tools worth keeping on your new split or really every USB drive are:
Cedrick Collombs unlocker.exe http://www.emptyloop.com/unlocker/, he designed the tool for primarily deleting locked files but it is superb at unlocking USB drives that Windows refuses to "Safely Eject", too often I used to either shutdown a running PC just to remove a drive or had to risk and yank a live running thumbdrive hoping I didn't just ruin it or my data.
The author's French, I suppose there are worse things you can say about a guy but his site has changed hosting providers and in case that link goes stale, search for Cedrick Collomb's Unlocker since spyware laced imitations have been released. Unlocker has an installer but after installation, findthe directory and copy the files since it executes just fine on any windowsPC without a formal install.
Get a copy of Sysinternals sync.exe http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897438 just like UNIX sync, used to flush the disk cache to the disk and can aid in safe ejection.
When SYNC fails to safely eject, use Sysinternals Procexp.exe http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx, another runtime exe (no install required, ever) and execute a search for the drive letter of the stubborn USB disk to learn which proccesses are locking the drive and also kill them just like taskmanager.
Also, try Sysinternals Handle utility which displays just open file handles for the purpose of unlocking and drive ejection.
Wanna be really militant about your USB drive, make it read only with JoeWare's writeprot.exe http://www.joeware.net/freetools/tools/writeprot/index.htm as long as its NTFS formatted, make it read only even if it doesn't have that little side read/write switch, use it even on NTFS hard drives of any size and installed inside the PC, whenever Joe isn't saving the lives and rescuing the free time of millions of sysadmins with his free utilities, he spends his time whispering advice into god's ear because Joe makes stuff that even deities use on their windows computers. writeprot read only status sticks with the disk wherever it goes so be aware that it remains protected across PC's but can be unlocked back to R/W on any other PC.
The advice you got from
"profit" was truly sincere but only half correct since splitting up that drive will send windows schizo, until you implement the hitachi cfadisk or equivalent feature, diskmgmt.msc will detect a removable drive with multiple partitions but refuse to assign a drive letter to every partition except one and that one will vary based on rules I still can't figure out. Microsoft seems to hate USB drives for all functions despite suitable speed and capacity. They'll support USB as system if if you'd like to spend a few thousand dollars for their embedded / compact OS studios and those are still usually one version behind, meaning they treat em last and at the moment we're still limited to using Windows 7 for embedded, point of sale, USB deployments. Even NT4 embedded was still being offered two years ago cause MS was trying to learn a concept the rest of the LINUX community had been using for a decade.
Windows 8 is being praised for USB installation support, but its like teen sex, everyone who is talking about isn't really doing it and I laugh at the BS I read from those who claim to know but clearly haven't done so based the bull they're posting.