Hide boot partition

Question

My rpi sd is partitioned as so:

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdd1            8192      122879       57344    b  W95 FAT32
/dev/sdd2          122880     8519679     4198400   83  Linux
/dev/sdd3         8519680    30702591    11091456    b  W95 FAT32

I use the third partition for video files. I want to hide FAT boot partition, so Windows can't see it but mount the third partition.

I tried changing partition type to 1b with fdisk:

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdd1            8192      122879       57344   1b  Hidden W95 FAT32
/dev/sdd2          122880     8519679     4198400   83  Linux
/dev/sdd3         8519680    30702591    11091456    b  W95 FAT32

But with this configuration rpi does not boot.

I don't need to have a FAT32 boot partition, is it possible to use an EXT2 boot partition?

Answer 1

You have to use fat for the boot partition. What you can do however, is delete both fat partitions, create a new fat partition at the end of the EXT3 partition so that the layout would then be -

    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdd2          122880     8519679     4198400   83  Linux
/dev/sdd1            8192      122879       57344    b  W95 FAT32

That should still boot, then you create a 3rd partition after the FAT32 one like so

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdd3         8519680    30702591    11091456    b  W95 FAT32
/dev/sdd2          122880     8519679     4198400   83  Linux
/dev/sdd1            8192      122879       57344    b  W95 FAT32

And windows should see the 1st big partition but not the 3rd small one You'll need to move the partitions when you do this too so that you have more space at the beginning, I haven't adjusted the start/end blocks in the example. Also, this should probably be done on a 2nd SD card and not your primary one as your risk killing your data.