I'm fortunate to have a C3000 and a C3100. I've been using pdaxrom beta2 on the C3000 for a while and enjoyed the simplicity of installing applications because the whole of the microdrive is available.

However, frustrated by the bugs in the C3000 beta I've decided to install pdaxrom beta 3 on my C3100. While this is much more stable, one of the greatest frustrations I find is that installing applications is not so simple. It seems obvious to use the space on the microdrive so why is this so difficult?

I'd rather not install apps to CF because I use this slot for wifi or bluetooth cards.
I'd rather not install apps to SD as I have a debian chroot environment on SD and I'd like to keep that clean

There is no sign of my microdrive on df.
filesystem blocks mounted on
/dev/root 51200 /
none 12288 /dev
/dev/mtdblock3 72704 /home
/dev/mtdblock3 72704 /mnt/user
/dev/mmcda1 499928 /mnt/card

Can I make an ext3 partition on the microdrive for installing apps?

What solution do other people here use?

Make the FAT partition smaller, then create an ext3 partition. Apart from system critical apps I keep the rest of my stuff on HD.

Thanks Desertrat, that certainly appears to make sense as it leaves a FAT partition in case you might want to connect the Z to a PC/Mac.

Can you tell me how to do it? I'm not an expert at this kind of thing and I cant even identify my HD in the df?

If this is done then what would need to be done to go back to the Sharp ROM?

you can use to display what partitions are mounted where. The microdrive is most likely /dev/hda

once you are sure that /dev/hda is the microdrive (I believe it can come up as hdb if there is a cf in the slot at boot), run but be aware that when you change the partition scheme and write the changes, any data on the modified partitions will be destroyed.

once in fdisk type m for help. change the partion type accordingly.

after the partition table is written (w in fdisk), you will need to format each partition.
or where X is the partition number.

As far as going back to the sharprom, you will need to get the hdd images from trisoft's site (here) and re-create the partition table. Then a NAND restore of the sharp rom.

goog luck

Thanks guys.

What I've managed to do is to fix the root partition to 121M and reinstalled pdaxrom. This at least gives me a little bit of space to play with.

Thinking about is again, what I might do is to get a 2 Gig SD card and to split that into two partitions, one for my debian install and the other for pdaxrom apps. That way I can still always go back to the Sharp ROM if I need to. However, pdaxrom is looking so good I'm not sure I will ever need to do so.