Hitachi microdrive issue.

[militumxpisti]

My lifedrive conked out two weeks ago, just wouldn't stay on after a full charge. I bought a new battery and tried it out but nothing good. If I took the battery out and replaced it the lifedrive would boot up and work fine. It's when it came time to recharge it I had problems. It would freeze and not react to anything not even a reset of any type as soon as it got close to a full charge. Maybe a problem with the board.

Well anyway I really don't care. I heard all about the failures of a lifedrive (thanks palm!!) and was expecting the worse since the day I got it. I only bought the thing because I needed a new palm after my sony clie went on the fritz. It was reasonable for the price ($300 with holux GPS).

Now... I have a sharp zaurus cl1000 and I'm VARY happy. This model doesn't have the built in 4gb-6gb microdrive so I want to add one. Some of the more seasoned butchers out there no where I'm going. I took the hitachi drive from the lifedrive and tossed it in my computer and ran fdisk on it. I "d" all the partitions on it and created just one new primary fat16 partition and wrote the table to the disk. Once out of fdisk I ran "mkfs.msdos -F 16" (I use linux) to the partition and remounted it. I can read and write perfect.

Here is my problem...

The card will not work on the zaurus or windows. I get and "I/O error" every time I try to mount it in windows and a "invalid module pass" on the zaurus. It mounts with no errors on slackware 11 (2.6 kernal). The zaurus sharp rom uses the 2.4 kernal but I flashed it with a another os that uses a different 2.4 kernal as well as one that uses the 2.6 kernal. Is there something someone out there knows about that I can use? Is there a special issue with the microdrive? Here is my dmesg...

SCSI device sdc: 7999488 512-byte hdwr sectors (4096 MB)
sdc: Write Protect is off
sdc: Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
sdc: assuming drive cache: write through
sdc: sdc1

I understand that this is slanted towards the zaurus forums but I thought I would drop a line here just in case it is the microdirve.

Thanks

Matt

[potter]

I "d" all the partitions on it and created just one new primary fat16 partition and wrote the table to the disk. Once out of fdisk I ran "mkfs.msdos -F 16" (I use linux) to the partition and remounted it. I can read and write perfect.
Theory: By spec, FAT16 only supports up to 2 GiB partitions. However, there are a few implementations which can use a 64 KiB cluster size (instead of the normal 32KiB max cluster size) to get up to a 4 GiB partition. Apparently your Linux does supports the 64KiB cluster 4 GiB partitions, but your Zaurus and your Windows do not.

[militumxpisti]

Thanks so much for the quick response. I should have mentioned that...

I have tried etx2 and fat32. I have even tried a fat16 1GB partition but none will mount in windows or on the zaurus.

Maybe my microdrive is broken. Anyone have success with using the drive in windows after a format?

[joepagIII]

i hav an old one that i use for file transfers between computers on and off the network with no problem

[militumxpisti]

Did you keep the original partition table? are you using fat16? could you tell me more.

Thanks

[joepagIII]

nothe partition table was not there whene i got it.... it was out of a dead unit....so i kept the usable parts and im using the drive as a transfer drive...use it daily...formated as fat 32....

[militumxpisti]

Still not working for me. Does anyone have a image of the drive I can use? (no palm os or anything just a 4gb partition). Maybe I screwed up the table ad would like should dd it.