[doveman2]

I don't know why people don't use their Pi to format and prepare their USB sticks - for example:

1. Boot the Pi from an SD card imaged with Raspbian
   
2. Once the Pi has booted, connect with ssh (or type at the console using an attached USB keyboard) - username "pi", password "raspberry".
   
3. Pop in your USB stick, it should be seen as /dev/sda (confirm with dmesg)
   
4. Partition/format the USB memory stick using ext4 (see instructions below)
   
5. Shutdown the Pi
   
6. Reformat your SD card (or use another SD card - it doesn't have to be more than 100MB and they're dirt cheap!) with a single FAT partition and copy across the OpenELEC system files

I've been so scared by horror stories of the SD card slot breaking that I try to avoid removing the card as much as possible! Maybe it would be good if we could have a dual boot on a single SD card, to choose between OpenElec or Raspbian (or any trimmed down OS that will let us SSH in and format USB sticks, etc). I guess we'd need a USB keyboard plugged in to choose which to boot from but as we'd only need to occasionally boot into the other OS, plugging one in when we do shouldn't be a problem, with OpenElec auto-booting after, say 3s, otherwise.