Phone says SD card is damaged when I partition it

thameera · July 6th, 2011, 09:57 AM

My phone is a Vodafone 945 running Android 2.1. I need to install Link2SD to move the apps to the SD card. It needs to partition the card into two partitions.

When I partition it into two FAT32 partitions using Minitool Partition Wizard, the phone says that the SD card is damaged.

What's the problem? Is there another way to partition the card without letting this happen?

Usta · July 6th, 2011, 10:15 AM

Try to use another partitioning tool, like Gparted.
Perhaps also a good idea to do card error checking scan on PC.

thameera · July 6th, 2011, 10:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Usta

Try to use another partitioning tool, like Gparted.
Perhaps also a good idea to do card error checking scan on PC.

Gparted didn't allow partitioning to FAT32

daveybaby · July 6th, 2011, 11:16 AM

Been a while since i did this, hopefully i remember it right...

(1) The first partitition (most of the card's space) should be formatted as FAT32 using (say) windows (or i guess minitool). This is where your music/photos/data etc will go (as normal).

(2) The second partition (i would recommend about 512MB tops, any more would probably be a waste unless youre gonna install *thousands* of apps) should be formatted as ext2 (i dont recommend ext3 or ext4) using GParted. This is where your apps will go.

(3) It's important to get the order of the partitions correct, the first partition MUST be the fat32 one, or the phone and your PC wont recognise it. The second ext2 partition should probably be invisible to your PC.

Usta · July 6th, 2011, 02:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thameera

Gparted didn't allow partitioning to FAT32

That is strange, because Gparted can format FAT32 and ext and bunch of other sort of partitions. Did you do the process correctly (burning the image and starting live CD)? What was the error message?

If you are going for a double FAT32, you can also use other partitioning tools like Easeus Partition Manager. Easeus.

If you are going for FAT32 + ext3, then either use Gparted or format the card from Linux, like Ubuntu. Making ext partitions with windows partitioning tools increases chances of their failure.

Since this topic is more relevant to your phone (Vodafone 945), we'd better move it to that phone's forum.