One of our customer is trying to maximize the partition sizes on small flash drives for an embedded system. However, the linux fdisk utility is extremely wasteful, since it insists on cylinder boundaries.
For the following, the first line is the orginal partition of a compact flash FAT16 file system. The second line is the partition from fdisk. For a 4M drive, up to 26% are unusable. Is anyone aware of a work around? Is there a better tools available? Thanks.
| BOOT | SYS | START | END | WASTED MB | FLAG | TYPE | CL HD ST LBA | CL HD ST LBA | SPACE
--------------------------------------------------------------------- 4 | 80 | 1 | 0 1 1 32 | 122 1 32 7840 | 352 4% 4 | 80 | 83 | 0 1 1 63 | 2 31 63 5985 | 2207 26%
--------------------------------------------------------------------- 8 | 80 | 1 | 0 1 1 1 | 240 15 193 16143 | 241 1% 8 | 80 | 83 | 0 1 1 63 | 6 31 63 14049 | 2335 14%
--------------------------------------------------------------------- 16 | 80 | 1 | 0 1 1 2 | 230 15 194 31966 | 802 2% 16 | 80 | 83 | 0 1 1 63 | 14 31 63 30177 | 2591 7% =====================================================================
Compact Flash Drive at