We were bitten big time by an annoying technical detail: it turns out that third generation iPods will connect to a computer using either a USB or a FireWire cable *BUT* they will only charge from the FireWire, not from the USB. We thought we had a big bag of dead 3G iPods, but now that we got a FW800-to-iPod cable for $5, the first “dead” 3G iPod we tried started right up! So we found this out the hard way, we’d been banging our heads against this pile of iPods using the USB cable… arg!
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!
Blog of Annoying Technical Details 
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