Multiple Filesystems on a USB key

Annoying Windows machines. It isn't often that I have to even touch a Windows computer (I normally am using either Linux or a Mac) but whenever I do it makes me sad for those millions of people that do use them. Anyway I was trying to move some files off someone else's Windows machine onto my nice little USB key, the only problem is that it has two filesystems, a Linux filesystem and a FAT32. Mac happily uses the FAT32 and ignores the Linux one, Linux can use both, and the Windows machine... just can't get past their being two and so won't use either and asks if I would like to format my USB key. Grrr, I really like having a native linux filesystem on my USB key.

Well I guess I will have to outsmart Windows. I will format the whole USB drive with FAT32 and then hide a ext4 filesystem in one of the files on the FAT32 filesystem. Hopefully that should make Windows happy and my computers will have to live with the extra couple of steps.

Basic steps:
dd if=/dev/zero of= bs=1048576 count=20
mkfs.ext4
Add something like the following to your /etc/fstab file:
/mountpoint ext4 user,noatime,loop 0 0

Or for a more detailed explanation, http://nst.sourceforge.net/nst/docs/user/ch04s04.html