Robert Nichols wrote:
MHR wrote:
On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 8:25 AM, Robert NicholsrnicholsNOSPAM@comcast.net wrote:
If you go into fdisk's "expert" mode and set the geometry to 31 heads, 31 sectors/track, 16319 cylinders you can utilize the full 8029470208 bytes.
I was able to do that.
Then I went back and looked at my Kingston - it has 5 "heads," 32 s/t and 99212 "cylinders."
Now the question becomes, if I try that on the Sandisk, will it trash the drive altogether, or would I still be able to use it, or would that fail because there really isn't that much space on the "drive?"
The first thing I do with every USB flash drive I buy is figure out a geometry that uses all of the sectors reported by fdisk (I have a shell script that does that in a pretty much brute force way.) and then repartition and re-format the drive using that geometry. I've never experienced any problem with that.
Re-reading your message, I think I misunderstood your question. No, you won't be able to access more sectors than the total capacity reported by fdisk. You won't trash the device, but making and using the filesystem will result in errors from attempts to access beyond the end of the device.