So, I have been using Preenv a bit recently and found myself running low on space in my filesystem partition. No problem, I thought, I will just dig up my 4GB MicroSD card that I hadn't been using lately, partition it ext3 and simply store my game files there.

The only problem is a couldn't actually find what happened to this mysterious MicroSD card. I looked everywhere for it (and by everywhere, I mean the two electronics I have that use them and its little plastic case I still have that came with it when I bought it. If it isn't in one of these spots, then the chances aren't real good I'll ever find it). So after 20 minutes of searching (well, actually, 2 minutes of searching, and 18 minutes of saying "i can't believe I lost another memory card!") I give up on that plan.

Then a brilliant idea occurred to me. Why don't I just resize the partitions on my N900? I don't use it for music anymore (I have a dedicated MP3 player for that) so that huge FAT partition is just siting there. Begrudgingly, I made a backup of both the contents of my MyDocs folder and all the low-level stuff using BackupMenu. Unfortunately, it was in that order! (call me el swifto).

I then merrily start VirtualBox on my laptop, start Linux and begin the shrink+grow with GParted (as I'm far to lazy to use a command-line for tasks like these). All is humming along great -- the shrink finishes successfully and i'm just waiting on the grow.

I switch over to Windows and start killing time as the grow is taking a bit longer. I chack back in about 15 minutes to... find to my horrer that VirtualBox has locked up! and GParted was only half done! OMG!

After repeated attempts at reviving VB (I don't think reviving is the correct word here. More like looking at the frozen and grayed out window and screaming in my head: COME ON! YOU CAN DO IT!), I decide to kill it (Ouch!). Start back up the virtual appliance and am unsurprised to find that GParted has a big red ! next to my ext3 root partition (remember, this is the main filesystem partition. The one my precious boots from).

Desperately, I run a Fix from inside GParted, reboot my N900 when finished, and hope for the best but fully expect 1) an infinite reboot loop, 2) a cryptic terminal message like "cannot stat /boot" and then just hanging there, or 3) something I haven't thought of but is even worse than 1 and 2.

In a bizarre, unexpected, and may I even say divine, twist of fate, my N900 boots perfectly, like the champ it is.

I love my Nokia N900

On a related note, my MicroSD card was snugly nestled in the MicroSD card slot in my MP3 player. Oops, I didn't know it used one of those?

No need to worry either way - the N900 boots from the internal UBIFS filesystem, and the ext3 partition is for holding programs and program configuration.

In the event that you break ext3 (this is easy on a device prone to watchdog reboots when the daemon is paged out), Maemo should still be able to boot.