Hello all,

I need to prepare a harddisk of 160Gb for an embedded cable settopbox. For this i have written service software running on this target on a Linux based SDK for a Mips based microprocessor.
For the harddisk i have used the Linux fdisk to create a first partition of 128Mb (bootloader section) and a second partition for the remaining space on disk (>150Gb).
The problem is that the standard mkfs application will not allow me to format this partition, it simply fails on a malloc call for memory space to create a FAT32 format table.
The system kernel memory can not be expanded further than 64Mb. Does anyone know what i can do to get this partition formatted without having to modify the mkfs application it self? Are there other tools available?

So far i have tried to create extra memory useing swap space and even lowlevel formatting (mkfs on a file, then binary copy the releavnt data to the disk), all failed.

64mb is plenty enough memory do to simple format jobs. As format is done incrementally and effects a relatively small portion of disk. Its more likely, that the kernel you're using, designed for embedded systems, has a few options stripped off. Say like large disk support.

Thanks for responding

The strange thing is that the application is the standaard mkfs application from busybox. Increasing the kernel memory even up higher than 64Mb still produces the same error.
There is no evidence of limitation to disk size, but with the current hard disk sizes, i am wondering how this should be done in general and particular for embedded systems.