So I have been banging my head against the strange partition format that palm pilots seem to expect on SD/MMC cards. I am foolhardy to be playing with a Palm Tungsten T2. Under PalmOS it supports SD card, but it doesn’t boot Linux from them yet, only MMC cards. So I searched around for some true MMC cards, which are hard to find these days. I got my hands on two 1gig MMC cards. The palmtt2 recognized them no problem and would start Garux (bootloader) from them no problem. But when I used cfdisk on Ubuntu or Disk Utility under Mac OS X to partition the MMC card, then PalmOS no longer saw Garux. Arg…. I tried gparted too, no luck.
Then I noticed that the palmtt2 would sometimes prompt to format the card when I stuck it in. So I said yes. It produced a partition format that cfdisk refused to read, saying: FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 0: Partition ends in the final partial cylinder. So I opened up gparted, and tried resizing the partition. That did the trick, I guess gparted kept the strange format that the palmtt2 was happy with. w00t! Now my palmtt2 boots up my custom GNU/Linux image!
December 9, 2008
