Resizing VFLASH Storage Device

Introduction

I tried first to remove GameOS HDD region, then created a smaller one and used the free space to create one new HDD region for Linux. But every time i did it, OFW removed it again at the next boot and reformatted the HDD. So i decided to use VFLASH because GameOS doesn't touch it.

VFLASH is a virtual device, as the name already suggests. VFLASH is the region #1 on the HDD of PS3. By default, VFLASH is only 256 MB. And it has one free region, region #7, which is currently not used by HV or GameOS.

First, i resized the VFLASH. By doing this, you will loose your data on HDD but NOT on VFLASH !!! VFLASH data remains untouched. Resizing VFLASH doesn't cause corruption of data already installed there !!! So backup your GameOS data from UFS2 partition before you will do it.

After resizing VFLASH, GameOS will reformat the HDD again but with a little difference :-) It will have less HDD space now because i made VFLASH larger.

First step is to remove GameOS partitions. Second step is to dump the partition table of HDD. Then resize VFLASH by modifying the partition table and writing it back to HDD. I did all these steps from A Linux booted by BootOS but it's not necessary and can be easily done from GameOS itself.