Using Linpus to format my SD Card

Hi All,

Quick question, how on earth do I format my SD card using Linpus - I have a 4gb HCSD card that I want to use in the left hand slot.

However I don't have a clue how to format it for use, I'd be grateful if someone give me some pointers?

Many thanks

Mark

 

While your AA1 is powered off, install the SDHC module, boot up the machine. The operating system will complain a little bit saying it doesn't recognize the device then a few seconds later the device gets mounted and the extra 4GB is available for use.

Cheers.

 

Just about all SD cards are pre-formatted as FAT. Might be worth checking to see if your card is indeed formatted (try a Windows machine to see).

 

I've got a Transcend 8 GB SDHC card fitted in the left hand slot, partitioned and formatted to the ext2 Linux file system.

I originally left the Transcend SDHC card using the pre-formatted FAT32 file system, but read that there might be some trouble reading and writing files to it with the Linux Linpus O.S., so I partitioned and formatted the SDHC card in the Terminal using shell commands (fdisk -l, mkfs.ext2 etc etc) to change to the Linux ext3 file system (and that wasn't straightforward, being a Linux dumbkopf, but I got there in the end.) However, I found I couldn't shut the AAO down, as it hanged every time. Only by taking the SDHC card out, would my AAO shut down, and I concluded that formatting the card to the ext3 file system was the problem. Doing some poking around, I discovered that the 8GB SSD drive inside my machine with Linpus on it (dev/sda) had been formatted using linux ext2, and not ext3, so I reformatted my SDHC card to the Linux ext2 file system and then I could shut the machine down and use it as normal. I believe there's a program called gparted or something that you can use to partition and format your SDHC card to ext2, so you don't have to go through the hassle that I did in the Terminal, plus unmounting and remounting the card, etc.

 

JCM,

You reply so nearly answered my question fully, I'm looking for the exact terminal shell commands to format the card with the ext 2 file system......

Can anyone advise further?

Regards

Mark

 

Mark,

If you right-click on the desktop and select System / Add/Remove software from the pull down menu, you should see gparted (gnome partition editor) listed in the package manager (just search for it).

Gparted is the easier option to take than the Terminal. To do it in the Terminal at root, I used fdisk -l to find out the device name of my SDHC card (dev/mmcblk0p1), and then fdisk dev/mmcblk0 to create a primary partition (it's a bit more complicated than that though - press M for help here. I recall deleting the previous partition by pressing "d", then adding a new partition by pressing "n", then writing the table to disk by pressing "w"), and mkfs.ext2 /dev/mmcblk0p1 to format to ext2 and create a filesystem. Before I formatted, I had to unmount the card (umount /dev/mmcblk0p1) as well. I wish I'd made a detailed note of everything I did really, but I know I made quite a few mistakes in the process. Hopefully someone well-versed in Fedora-Linux reading here can give more detailed instructions.

BTW, when I partitioned and formatted the SDHC card, I did it using the right-hand slot. I don't suppose it matters which slot you use, but I'm not 100 % certain.