Can I bounce a few thoughts off you and see what I might learn or what ideas it might spark for yourself and others?
Please be patient with me because I'm no expert on this stuff, particularly Linux.
Please also feel free to correct me on anything that follows:
We are dealing with a 1GB flash memory chip that some piece of software makes look like a hard disk with 4 partitions on it so that the linux commands know how to speak/deal with it.
How many bytes in 1GB? 1073741824 bytes (not sure about that answer).
I've been trying to find information on the 1GB IC to answer that but keep hitting dead ends.
If the answer to that question is more than the size of mmcblk0 (1028128768 bytes) then is it possible that the firmware (EFI chip?) can access that "surplus" storage directly without the "I'm a disk drive" shell game?
If so, is that where our problem is?
I find it really hard to believe that there is a hardware fault and not some sort of corruption in the 1GB flash...or maybe I'm feeling optimistic today!
Also, how do they keep only 8192 bytes out of the partitions for NVRAM when a cylinder is 32768 bytes?