The following is the environment which I used:
Jetpack4.6.0
Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS
kernel 4.9.253
Module: Jetson Nano
I formatted my mSATA disk to GPT and try to set the whole disk to one partition. I used Disks application which built in Ubuntu OS to do that. When I try to add partition in ext4 format, it comes out an Error creating partition message, which was shown below:
If I want to use Disks application to create one partition, the volume cannot set to whole disk space, otherwise it will shown the error message above.
By the way, I also used gparted application to create partition, it can be done sucessfully and the whole disk is set into one partition.
Next, I used another two OS to create partition in mSATA:
1.
Jetpack4.4
Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS
Kernel 4.9.140
Module: TX2
I can’t tell you the answer. I will suggest though that maybe you have the wrong idea of what whole disk space really means.
Some disk space is consumed by metadata. There is metadata set up at the leading part of every disk. The actual content varies depending on whether or not it is an old style drive or a solid state drive. Furthermore, you need to distinguish between older applications which want a “BIOS style” partition scheme, versus one which uses GPT partitioning (this latter is what modern systems use, and what all Jetsons use). There are some pretty severe limitations on older BIOS style tools which are not updated to work with GPT.
As an example, on command line, the fdisk command line tool is intended for older BIOS partitioning. The newer gdisk (which is still several years old) works with GPT partitioning. So you must first make sure your application is based on GPT and not BIOS.
I don’t know if this is the case, but if some tool has set up the disk for BIOS, but you are using GPT, or the other way around, then the tool might have problems if it isn’t able to completely wipe the old metadata.
Perhaps the metadata is taking up space and you’re not allowing for that. Sometimes sizes are listed in multiples of 1024 bytes (such as KiB, MiB, GiB, base 2 sizes), and sometimes sizes are listed in 1000 byte multiples (base 10, such as KB, MB, GB). Mixing up the two might give the illusion that size is decreased or increased. Imagine if I ask one person how far it is to the next city, and he says “20 miles”. Then I ask someone else, and he says “32.1869 kilometers”. They don’t look like the same answer, but they are (depending on how many decimal places you use).
Assuming this device shows up as “/dev/sda” (it is what you mentioned earlier), what do you see from these commands:
lsblk -f /dev/sda
sudo gdisk -l /dev/sda
sudo blockdev --getsize64 /dev/sda
(you can also name individual partitions such as sda1 with this)
I almost forgot: The filesystem itself must be understood to use a partition, and this in turn takes up more space for metadata.
