Unallocated partition created by osmc

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1

When cloning my SD card I noticed that osmc created 3 partitions on the card.

  • FAT32 +/- 250MB
  • Unallocated 1MB
  • EXT4 as large as available

Is there a particular reason for the unallocated space?
What is the reason to do this?

2

What tool are you using to display the partition table ? There will only be two partitions:

osmc@vero:~$ fdisk -l /dev/mmcblk0

Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 14.9 GiB, 15931539456 bytes, 31116288 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x00061a6a

Device         Boot  Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/mmcblk0p1        2048   499711   497664  243M  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/mmcblk0p2      501760 31115263 30613504 14.6G 83 Linux

“Unallocated space” is not a partition, it is an unpartitioned part of the drive. Because it is only 1MB I would say that it is there for alignment reasons as partitions have to follow particular boundary alignment to be readable on a normal Windows PC. This means there is typically a small amount of unpartitioned (wasted) space on a drive on the order of a few MB.

3

I used Gparted to shrink the ext4 partition. I did this because my second sd card was smaller. Thats when I noticed the unallocated space of 1MB.