Thulium

Apparently since the last time I had to do a hard reset and then restored from a backup on "built-in storage". All the files I had stored there have disappeared, but the space has not been released. I've now removed EVERYTHING I had left in "built-in storage", but I'm still showing 16.5mb in-use and only 4.73mb available.

I want my space back! Any ideas??

JakeRich

Did you try a soft reset? That might get the directory reset.

Thulium

No luck on a soft or hard reset. Any suggestions for digging deeper on this? I do have access to the last 4mb of space, (read and write works okay and the disk space is again available) so I think this is a fixable problem...

Maybe there is some sort of format utility for the built-in storage area? I know I'd wanna be careful, cuz I doubt I wanna reflash the OS, but what are the options?

Thulium

I just did some searching around and found some interesting information in the forums o'er at Dell. It seems that I'm not nearly the only person with this issue, and I don't believe it is a hardware failure. My experience with PC's has shown me a gazillion ways for files and storage space to get corrupted, and often the only fix is to reformat. In my case, at least, I'm more than willing to reformat the Built-In Memory, but I haven't found a utility to do it. According to "Codezilla" from the Dell forums, such a utility is very possible to create, but I don't know if anyone has actually done so.

Here's a snippet from 'Codezilla's post:

Quote:

Intel StrataFlash memory is not your everyday flash ROM. It contains special features that allow it to be divided into partitions that can serve different purposes. The file partition is completely separate from the OS partition and can be formatted independently. The file partition is accessed through an installable file system provided by Intel call the Persistent Storage Manager (PSM). Here is a quote from Chapter 4 of the Intel Persistent Storage Manager User's Guide - Formatting the File Partition: OEMs need not wait for a cold boot to do a format; they can cause a format at any time by calling FG_Init and passing a pointer to both an empty buffer for a memory map structure (type PSM_OEMInfo) and to a structure of type PSM_FormatOptions. FG_Init is a function or method in a dll provided as part of PSM that performs the actual formatting. So, no, a formatting utility for Built-in Storage would not wipe out the operating system.

It seems like this sort of Utility would be invaluable, so where is it??? The only other suggested solution is to swap hardware with Dell. I suspect Dell will get tired of doing exchanges every time somebody needs to reformat. ...I know I would.