partition table on virgin Sandisk 8G microSDHC

qobi at purdue.edu (Jeffrey Mark Siskind) · Sat, 02 Feb 2008 16:31:39 -0500

I purchased a new Sandisk 8G microSDHC card. I plan to repartition and
reformat it as ext{2,3} for my N810. On the virgin card, fdisk (on my desktop)
reports:

   Disk /dev/sdf: 8168 MB, 8168931328 bytes
   39 heads, 5 sectors/track, 81820 cylinders
   Units = cylinders of 195 * 512 = 99840 bytes

      Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
   /dev/sdf1              43       81821     7973376    b  W95 FAT32

This seems strange. Does anybody know why:

(a) the partition starts at 43 (instead of 1) and
(b) the partition ends at 81821 (instead of 81820)

Will anything break if I repartition it to use the whole card (1...81820)
as a single (ext{2,3}) partition?

    Jeff (http://www.ece.purdue.edu/~qobi)