Thanks for this post, saved my stress levels

Firstly, what silly idea, to make the partition bigger than the device itself?! I have seen some cheap USB drives do exactly the same thing, which makes me wonder about their supplier...

Anyway, for those running Linux on a computer and have some idea what they are doing, you can do all of this from your Linux box, as I did about 5 minutes ago. I considered putting up instruction, but variances in Linux distributions means it's going to be different for everyone, so I'll just list off a few notes to consider, these hints may help some windows users also:

* The problem is not the format of the card, a simple reformat will not fix it. It's the partition on it, I initially had problems with running 'cfdisk' because it didn't like the partition size (bigger than the device); running 'fdisk' and deleting the first partition (command 'd 1') first fixes this. (Should some of this paragraph be in red?)
* Watch out for automounters, I don't have them running, but they may go to war with you over control of the devices, you want exclusive control over the internal card.
* Make sure the device is completely shut down, it seems the N810 doesn't seem to completely shutdown when the power supply is plugged in. I have found with some packages that play with system files and require a reboot do not go away when I rebooted with power in (weird?).
* Booting up with the USB plugged into a PC will solve the swap memory issue, as the N810 can't mount the internal disc (and therefore can't access the swap device as it can't be un-ticked on a read-only filesystem).
* My devices were backwards on the N810, internal was always mmc2, but in Linux via USB it was the first device (sdc for me), so make sure you are formatting the correct device, remove the external card if you're paranoid.
* The original format of the card was FAT32, mkdosfs by default creates FAT16. Not a major issue, but you'll lose some space, running 'mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/sdc1' formats it to its original format.