When I put in new 2GB card, I partitioned it using following commands

# sfdisk /dev/mmcblk0
/dev/mmcblk0p1:1,52500,6
/dev/mmcblk0p2:52501,,
/dev/mmcblk0p3:
/dev/mmcblk0p4:

So in effect mmcblk0p1 is mmc1 and is about 1.6 GB. I put the dual boot os in mmcblk0p2 with excellent help from Fanoush and with his tool/utils/scripts.

Now MMC1 is 1.6 GB but is FAT 16 and hence block size of 32 KB. I when I copied about 15000 gifs (individual frames of video), with each frame being gif and small file i.e. < 1 KB. These 15000 files should be taking about 15 MB, but is taking about 480 MB, due to block size of FAT 16 on MMC1 which I believe is due to 32 KB.

Is there a way I can change this mmc1 parition to FAT32 ? Or partition it into two one for FAT16 (if required) and another for FAT32 ? And that too without disturbing, /dev/mmcblk0p2 so that I do not have re-do the clone OS thingy. I installed a few applications after doing the clone.

I searched the forums, there is lot of talk about having more than 2 partition and also how to make FAT32 parition. But couldn't find any thing which say how to delete just one partition or re-do FAT16 parition to FAT32 partition without disturbing dual OS.

Thank in advance.

Anybody, any opinion, any pointer, anything ...??? Please post some solution and save me from re-doing the whole thing again. I have installed some applications and done lot of customization and created/stred many files. Please save me from re-doing. So please post.

I did it, I did it .......


Here it is how I did it.


Switch off swap if you have it on.
#umount /media/mmc1

# sfdisk -d /dev/mmcblk0 > mmcblk0

Now open mmcblk0 file and edit
change id= 6 to id= b in the first line.
(Be careful in command below, - f is for force, and may result in loss of data in all the partitions). By the I didn't loose anything except for my MMC1 files. My other partions, even dual boot are intact :-)
# sfdisk -f /dev/mmcblk0 < mmcblk0


Zero out the first 512 bytes of data.
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk0p1 bs=512 count=1
#shutdowun -r now

#mkdosfs -s 2 -F 32 /dev/mmcblk0p1 (clustersize of 1 KB)
#mount /dev/mmcbkl0p1 /media/mmc1
#shutdown -r now

Have fun. Now I have cluster size of 1 KB. Yaya. My small files should not take lof of memory. The IO throughput will suffer. Let me see how much it suffers.

Are you sure the change of partition id was needed? I guess you could just reformat to fat32 without messing with sfdisk. Linux definitely doesn't care about partition ID at all and I guess Windows doesn't care about type 6 vs b too. So maybe the only line that really did the trick was

Hi,

I was wondering if you have experienced any negative results after changing to FAT32?

I currently am booting OS from MMC (2GB Kingston RS-MMC Mobile), and the second partition on the MMC is FAT16. I put a folder of small files on the MMC, and 18MB turned into 160MB.

It is working fine now. I have tons of games, lots of applications and yes my very much needed small files and still have 1 GB in spare.

I believe tablet is a bit slower than fat16, but not so much. Over all I am very happy and will recommend everybody FAt32 instead of FAT16.