Mounted phone memory card shows incorrect disk size.

[cj]

Liam Proven wrote:
> On 09/05/07, Johan Grönqvist <johan.gronqvist at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> I started gparted again to repartition the memory stick to fat32, but
>> gparted said that there was no filesystem* on the card. I do not
>> understand this, but guess that my phone somehow does not let me control
>> the partition, and instead displays something that is mountable, but
>> seems to contain no partitions at all (not even a partition table if I
>> understand things correctly).
>>
>> The internal memory of the phone presents itself as a disk with one
>> partition (fat16) spanning most of the disk, but the memory stick
>> presents itself as a totally empty disk (to gparted).
>>
>> I will now probably give up, and use it in the  semi-reliable way I used
>> it so far.
>>
>> (Btw: Windows (XP) is also not reliably writing to the memory stick
>> card.)
>>     
>
> There seems to be a lot of well-intentioned misinformation in this thread!
>
> For one thing, FAT16 is the common format for removable solid-state
> media because a lot of embedded device OSs cannot handle FAT32.
>
> I would recommend strongly that you stick to FAT16, even though it is
> very inefficient on such a large volume.
>
> The largest supported size on DOS and DOS-compatible OSs for FAT16 is
> 2GB, using 65,536 32kb clusters. (MS-DOS, PC DOS, DR DOS, Win95/98/ME
> etc.)
>
> Old versions of Windows NT (before Windows 2000) can only handle FAT16
> & can only format FAT volumes during setup. They can't format NTFS.
> So, you must install onto FAT16 and then convert to NTFS. For this
> reason, NT4 includes a special tweaked FAT16 with 64kb clusters, just
> for installation, to allow you a 4GB C: drive. It's intended to be
> immediately converted to NTFS.
>
> FAT32 is used from 512MB up to 8TB but NT will intentionally only
> format volumes of <32GB, because of its slow speed and inefficiency on
> larger volumes. However, on FAT32, the maximum single *file* size is
> still 2GB.
>
> It may be that your card was not actually partitioned but just
> formatted as a raw filesystem, in the same way that floppy disks are
> handled.
>
> I always advise using an OS which handles a given filesystem
> *natively* to format that FS. Use DOS or NT to format FAT, NT for
> NTFS, Linux for ext2/3 and so on.
>
> I suggest you put your card in a card reader, boot the machine under
> DOS or NT, partition it with one big primary FAT16 partition, format
> that to FAT16, and use it as that alone. Once you have done that, it
> should work on anything.
>
>   
my reaction:

Yes its true that some embedded oses dont support fat32. some, like my 
sharp yo-520, dont support fat16, but all the pda's youll see now days 
will work with fat/fat16 atleast.

Besides, Didnt windows nt handle ntfs 3.1?

wikipedias fat32 definition states that fat32 maxes at 4 GiB minus 1 byte



--cj