Your experience with partitioning a flash drive?

There is some information that often when you partition a flash drive, under windows you see just the first partition. Under linux you see them all.

There is also info from people claiming to be using them all just fine. So I decided to try to get some first hand opinions from people that actually did that.

I'm also interested in backward compatibility, for example if I need to use the flash drive on a PC with XP or Vista to boot from one of the partitions or so...

Why do you want to do this?

It requires a boot manager so is not really worth the trouble.

You can make it bootable yet still store other files on it: Universal USB Installer

I'm not sure of your intended usage, but I can't imagine wanting to or needing to partition a flash drive. What is it you are trying to do?

well it's a 32gb flash drive i need one partition for booting linux and another for storing encrypted backup
i can store the encrypted backup file in the first partition as well, but then anyone can delete it.
If it's in second partition that's hidden unless mounted with truecrypt it would be much more fool proof

Flash drives are a very bad choice for backups. They are far less reliable than the drives you would be backing up.

it's just one of the back-ups and what i like about it is that it's always with me in my pocket
another flash drive would kill the convinience.

Anyway, lets not move the focus of the thread.

Why you guys think that partitioning a usb drive is such a bad idea, tech wise?