GParted failing to format a partition


MarioPandio

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Hi, just wondering if anyone can help out with some terminal commands or alternatives to GParted, as its failing to allow me to either format or delete my SD card installations partition, in order to allow me to reinstall the SZ 160 firmware?

The primary SD card is split into BOOT (fat32), Linux Swap, ROOT (ext3) and a larger STORE (fat32) partition and suddenly it no longer accepts my correct password to boot from the SD install and is stuck in a loop requesting username and password endlessly.

Usually if GParted fails to format/delete then reformat the ROOT (ext3) partition, I use a different PC and partitioning software but I don´t have access to them at the moment.

Dosfs tools (? iirc) should be useable via GParted, can someone tell me the correct terminal commands to either reformat the ROOT partition (mmcblk0p3) to ext3, or how to delete and then remake it again in the space unallocated please?

Any advice appreciated, as its been so long since any Pandora issues (been stable for ages) I have forgotten this info.
 
This is a really dumb question but:

Did you try "sudo gparted" from the terminal?

EDIT: dumb, referring to the question I asked.
 
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Thanks to both of you for the help, that got it sorted out for a fresh SD install. Many thanks

Just of curiosity really, are there any other partitioning tools/formating on the Pandora and are there any Imaging programs for making images of a Partition/card for fast recovery?
 
fdisk + mkfs.* is the standard combo.

You can easily save/recover using this:

http://pandorawiki.org/Backup

-EDIT: Note that you should fsck, then delete all files/folders before restoring.
 
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Many thanks again Linux-SWAT,

I was not aware of Lucky Backup or BGS either and the page you linked sounds a fairly ideal Pandora only solution to tar up and re apply a working backup fairly quickly. Sounds straight forward enough even for me, so I´ll give it a whirl sometime. Cheers.
 
You're welcome.

You can also delete files, _then_ fsck. Should be faster.
 
Yes, as long as none of the files are so corrupted that they can't be deleted.  Personally I'd probably delete everything I can, fsck, then delete anything left over.
 
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