ARrrggh!,
First of all for about the 400th time it seems I posted a C3100 issue in the wrong forum (the Cx00/CXX00 thing REAAALLY trips us dislexic folk up when clicking on a forum). So my apologies. Since it's here I'll try to make some good use out of it.
First Poster,
The C3100 actually mounts the internal drive partitions by script and if you use any other method the boot process actually comes to a violent halt if they aren't setup correctly. I don't understand how to correctly do that yet, (part of what the bounty is for). If you can mimick the exact partitioning settings of the first two partitions you can actually press Cntrl-c when it halts to get it to finish booting. However the third partition (which is 90+ % of the storage that the microdrive provides) is not available and cannot be manually mounted- so at least you can boot far enough along to edit files and such- I just have no idea what changes need to be made nor where to make them. Even if I were to get that far I still could not have my Swap/FAT32/EXT3 drive because I cannot get it to boot at all if I make any variation to the size/structure of partitions 1 and 2. This only leaves me with 2 partitions left to play with and three partition types. It would all be SUCH a piece of cake if I could simply change the size and type of the first two "unused" partitions - but then I wouldn't be waving cash around trying to attract help in a fairly quick manner. =( =( =( However I do thank you VERY much for trying to be helpful- right now the attitude boost that gives me is precious indeed!
Doc,
You're right. I CAN achieve what I wish using looback devices. In many ways it is quite the elegant solution. For performance and stability reasons though I'd rather not add in the extra layer of translation software. One of the reasons for installing a new drive that is 150% larger than the stock one is to avoid this very issue and be able to mount/install things in their native file-structure. However if no other solution is found I'll have to fall back onto this method as it may be the only way.
In your case as your using it in conjunction with your SD card it's the perfect solution. The SD interface on the Zaurii is the bottleneck in performance and it's so terrible already that running a loopback device over it has been tested recently and only adds about 1% overhead so it's not a problem with SD. With CF it's a completely different matter- it is a much greater performance hit when used on a CF device. I really want to avoid this if possible. (For the same reason I'm trying to have a Swap Partition rather than a swap file.)
As always thanks Doc!
-NeuroShock
PS Moderator- I'm planning on reposting this thread in it's appropriate forum so if you wish to kill this one I understand completely.