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Can anyone make a tutorial that shows how to partition SD card for the Android Eclair for Kaiser -- Dark Themed ? Please, greatly appricated if you did =]
Moved as not ROM Development.
Think your best bet is to PM one of the peeps releasing builds to ask if they can? or ask in one of the numerous droid threads.
I suggest using Gparted.
As I understand, Android can read ext2, which is light years ahead of fat32.
Warning: The following assumes that Andriod's file system and base operation operates like GNU/Linux
I'm not sure this will work... or how to get android to do this... but:
In GNU/linux, you would make a line in /etc/fstab for the device, unless it is handled by an automounter they designed.
Anyway, you can resize the fat32 to two partitions, and you should be able to make a 2ndary partition on the SD for linux.
I assume you are running windows, so to run Gparted, you will need to use the Live CD.
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php
A sample fstab line:
Code:
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
UUID=7d126676-b613-457f-b50f-5f69929b06d6 / ext3 errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/sda6 /home ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
I'd assume they have some sort of andriod application that opens a terminal with bash, or edit the /etc/fstab by some other means.
Best of luck!
Or you can just do this in Fat32
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=267475
Thanks for the attempt at an explanation. I'm in the same boat as the original poster. I think the problem is that Android is currently running from my SD card on my Tilt, so I don't know if it's possible to partition the card while Android is running.
I've got a Windows 7 PC at home, and I can boot it from a Linux CD if needed... but I'm a total Linux NEWB. I'd really appreciate it if someone can point me to instructions for how to partition a 4 GB SD card to accommodate an Androd build along with being accessible form Windows Mobile.
Can someone give an overview of the process and maybe some partition size guidelines?
Thanks,
-Brett.
Google Can
Gparted is good, it lets you resize partitions without formating them. It's part of the Ubuntu live cd's.
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/resize/resizing.htm
I bought new SD card i want to wipe my phone completely and install Darkys Rom. I formated my new SD card to ext2 in Ubuntu but my phone didn't recognize the file system. Then i used Clockwork to format my (external) SD card and what i did i formated my internal SD card. I'm completely failed. Can somebody give me step by step tutorial how to format external SD Card to ext2 or ext4. Also i would like to know if i will be able to copy data under windows when the phone is connected through USB.
Thank you
Sorry for my English
Hi! Please tell me why do you want to format your SD card to ext2 or ext4? There is no need for that. Just format it tu FAT and that's it. If you want to apply lagfix then do it under recovery with the lagfix option under advanced features.
Greets from Croatia.
DanXo said:
Hi! Please tell me why do you want to format your SD card to ext2 or ext4? There is no need for that. Just format it tu FAT and that's it. If you want to apply lagfix then do it under recovery with the lagfix option under advanced features.
Greets from Croatia.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I would like to have option to transfer bigger files than 4GB.
+1
how do I format my external SD card to ext2? I have Samsung Captivate. I got Cygwin, since I use Windows. Does anyone know what commands to type in cygwin?
I want to put files larger than 4GB on my card as well.
I think this will be useful for a lot of people.
I found a thread http://android.modaco.com/content/h...an-i-bind-mount-e-g-system-sd-xxx-sdcard-xxx/
But I am a noob in Linux, and it would be GREAT to have step by step commands I would have to type in to format my external SD card, while its in the phone, etc
Possible problem I see is that the phone might not recognize external card if its ext2/3/4 . We might have to have small FAT32 partition on there as well? Or may be Froyo has that ability...
I'm looking into doing this myself, in my case so I can use symlinks to copy apps "data" folders (not the "data" partition, but the folders in /mnt/sdcard where apps put different things) onto the larger, external sdcard. It seems like it could be possible, just need to make sure the /etc/fstab file is updated properly, and of course make sure your kernel has the ext2 and/or ext4 modules loaded and running (which you probably will if you have a lagfix installed). I will play with this and post back my results here...
I have been looking for this myself for a while aswell, but on 4 different kernels and CWM v2.5 and CWM v3.0, I couldn't find any option on how to change the ext. SD to Ext4. If anyone knows how to then please post it here!
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA Premium App
So, progress report...
Still no success in this matter, although I have learnt a bit today about Android's internal workings. After backing up my system with CWR, I first tried formatting my ext sd card with gparted on my computer. Bad choice... Even though no config files were stored in it as far as I could tell, Android "panicked" and decided to restore all my configs to default, severely crippling my system and making a lot of apps force close when I restarted the phone.
At that point I thought, since it is now broken, might as well play with it So the next thing I tried was formatting my internal sd card (only the vfat partition that gets mounted in /mnt/sdcard) to ext2, but this time using the "busybox mke2fs" command, on the terminal emulator on the phone. This seemed to be successful, and I could read and write to the new ext2 partition, although for some reason, I got the feeling that apps kept resetting their settings (not sure what caused this, didn't really looked into it much). So once that was up and running, I decided to modify the /etc/fstab file, like I would do in a normal linux environment, to automount this partition on boot, as ext2.
At this point I rebooted the phone, but hmm... Android converted the partition back to vfat. Not good. This leads me to believe there must be some kind of "recovery" commands run on startup, in case the system detects the partition is not the default file system, or something along the lines of that. At this point it got kinda late, so I decided to document my progress, restore (which thankfully left my phone the way it was at the beginning of the day) and call it a day.
So, things that I still need to find out:
1) How does the system convert the partition back to vfat on startup and how could I avoid it from doing it? Maybe by having a small vfat partition to fool it into thinking all is good and normal?
2) When I had my partition as ext2, I couldn't see it on my computer when connected via USB (I'm on a linux system so the fs being ext2 is not a problem). Wonder why...
3) If I had a small vfat partition, how would I go about mounting the ext2 partition on the same mount point after the system checks the vfat one? Maybe by binding it? Gotta look into that as well.
4) Finally, have to check why the apps couldn't maintain their settings after a certain amount of time (for example, if I opened terminal emulator and changed the colors, these would stay if I closed and opened the app again right away, but if I closed it for a while, say half an hour, and opened again, it would be back to default...)
I'm on a Galaxy S btw. If anyone has any insight on any of these matters, would be much appreciated!
Any progress? Would really like to use +4 GB files.
morow said:
I would like to have option to transfer bigger files than 4GB.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It is immpossible because of hardware limitations of the SD card And often if the file is big it just fail!
Hristov1 said:
It is immpossible because of hardware limitations of the SD card And often if the file is big it just fail!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Not true, read the rest of the thread before u post! Its not a hardware limitation, its because Android uses fat32 as filesystem.
hello everyone,
I just wanted to check to make sure that there is no solution for this 4gb limitation with Android yet? I too have been looking for something besides resizing files.
thanks
uki
I have ext2 on my external 32GB SDCard, just formatted it on my PC and put it in the phone, working without any problems. I just watched a full length 720p movie with DTS sound on my phone without having to re-encode the mkv
I'm using CM7.1 on my phone which auto-mounts the SDCard even with ext2. It won't work on stock ROM, but any kernel that has ext2 support should be able to read ext2-formatted cards but they might not auto-mount the sdcard.
On my PC I had to install a ext2 file system driver (google ext2fsd) for Win7 to be able to read the card when attaching the phone to the PC.
I was hoping to be able to figure all of this out on my own (so that I could impress everybody with my brilliance, of course! ), but I've hit a brick wall, so I figured I would see whether anybody had any suggestions.
The short version: I'd like to be able to create an alternate and larger /osh partition that we can run Ubuntu off of so that we can install software more freely as well as not worry about any future software updates that might conflict with the partition contents.
My thought was that it should be possible to have an alternate partition to /osh that's used to run from (whether it's mounted on /osh or not is largely irrelevant).
However, the problem I'm hitting up against is a matter of timing. The best entry point I've found to modify behaviour is /system/bin/mountosh when it's called by /init.rc, especially since it's responsible for most of the webtop setup. The catch is that by the time mountosh is called, the only partitions mounted are through p16, meaning that internal storage (p18) isn't available and the SD card (mmcblk1) isn't available either, meaning that there's no way to use either (a loopback file on the former, a partitioned SD card for the latter). I suppose it would theoretically be possible to create a loopback file on p16 (data), but that's only 2 GB and would conflict with other uses.
Does anybody know how to force internal storage and/or the SD card to be mounted earlier? Or is this going to require hacking a kernel (and bootloader and...) that we don't have the source code to yet? If I can get past this piece, then I'll be able to help other users get a webtop that would be in much better shape (especially since this would let us start using apt without having to worry so much about space issues). Thanks!
I am not sure off hand at the moment, but you might have a look at /etc/fstab and see if you can have the sdcard mounted earlier there. While having it mounted earlier may have some unexpected side effects; I presume the driver for the sd card reader is compiled into the kernel, so I don't see a reason it can't be mounted earlier.
But, not having an atrix anymore I can't test this outright.
Fenny said:
I am not sure off hand at the moment, but you might have a look at /etc/fstab and see if you can have the sdcard mounted earlier there. While having it mounted earlier may have some unexpected side effects; I presume the driver for the sd card reader is compiled into the kernel, so I don't see a reason it can't be mounted earlier.
But, not having an atrix anymore I can't test this outright.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
/etc/fstab is pretty meaningless, unfortunately. Most of the mounting is performed within /init.rc, and I see no entries for the external storage there. As it stands, the entry for the internal storage is more in the format of "on X, do Y" rather than the more traditional procedural format, so I'm not sure how much control I can have over that.
Also, second thoughts tell me that putting a filesystem file in /mnt/sdcard would be stupid, because it would cause all kinds of issues when attempting to USB mount the partitions from a computer.
I think the best way to attack this would be to pivot to another filesystem structure on the external sdcard. I'll take a look at init.rc later today and see what can be done.
agentdr8 said:
I think the best way to attack this would be to pivot to another filesystem structure on the external sdcard. I'll take a look at init.rc later today and see what can be done.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So you'd think. And that's what I did. I have a nice 2 GB ext3 partition on my SD card with the contents from the /osh partition (p13) rsync'ed over. But, only the mmcblk0 partitions are available when mountosh runs (up through p16), with no mmcblk1 partitions. Naturally, /dev/block/vold is empty as well.
I might need to poke some contacts to see if it's possible to detect mmcblk1 earlier, but in the meantime, I might just create a filesystem file in /data (p16). Hell, /data is almost 2 GB large, and I'm only using a little over 500 MB in it, so there's plenty of free space there. Why did they make it so large? Do people really download that much crap to their phone?
Grr...
So, even creating a file in /data and mounting that via loopback doesn't work, even if it's mounted on top of the existing /osh partition. I'm guessing that they have some level of verification.... So yeah. Something else is missing here.
I had two sucessful ways of overcoming this. The first way was to move /usr onto /data, and to symlink it back. But, I wanted a way of not modifying /osh, so I ended up creating a init.d script to bind a copy of /osh over /osh. I don't have access to a dock or HDMI monitor at the moment, so I can't confirm if the webtop launches with either of these methods, but full functionality worked in the command line.
shawnbuck said:
I had two sucessful ways of overcoming this. The first way was to move /usr onto /data, and to symlink it back. But, I wanted a way of not modifying /osh, so I ended up creating a init.d script to bind a copy of /osh over /osh. I don't have access to a dock or HDMI monitor at the moment, so I can't confirm if the webtop launches with either of these methods, but full functionality worked in the command line.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah, that's the thing. Everything worked on the command line, but X itself refused to start, even after I completely disabled TOMOYO (even when running /etc/init.d/startX.sh by hand).
I might decide to poke at it another time, but I'll at least wait for the SBF situation to sort itself out first.
I've been thinking about this for a few days now. Then, today, xda posted an article on repartitioning the Xperia to gain some advantage. So it seems like a good time to pose this question for us HD+ owners.
This a "feasibility study" question. I'm not a developer. I can hardly hack my way though Mint, let alone the HD+. I'm asking if the following possible?
(If yes, maybe a nice developer will do it for us? )
Can we shrink and repartition the /factory partition in the HD+ (as they shrink partitions in the Xperia) and use the leftover space as /swap?
Background
I've been reading leapinlar's excellent treatises on the partition structure in the HD+ (see Item 16) and how the /factory partition, meant for automatic disaster recovery, doesn't do us much good if you've installed a custom ROM and a custom recovery. (See all of Item A12.)
Among other things, the /factory partition contains an image of the stock B&N ROM. Which will cause bootloops if triggered when you're running CM.
But, if I understand it correctly, the /factory partition isn't a total waste. It duplicates some important data from the /rom partition (devconf), which could come in handy IF you put the stock recovery back on in an attempt to fix your HD+. (Then it could rebuild the /rom partition if it had become corrupted.)
So, as it stands now, /factory is 448 MB that's mostly useless to us. Can't we put it to good use? Like /swap? Or direct zRAM to it?
Leapinlar has already created some repartitioning tools, as has the Xperia dev now. So I'm hoping a lot of the hard work has been done already.
Proposal
(I apologize in advance is my terminology isn't exactly correct.)
Is it possible to:
1) remove the factory.zip from the /factory partition and then shrink the partition to accommodate only the /rom backup files. (I'm thinking that all factory zips are the same size, so once the new smaller partition is calculated, it ought to be the same for everyone's HD+);
2) create a new partition from the left over space, calling it (new) partition #11;
3) format partition #11 as swap
4) easily tell CM 10 or CM 11 to use the /swap? I'm hoping this can be done with just a init.d script. (Maybe an fstab tweak too?)
5) Or perhaps dedicate #11 for zRAM, as a kernel developer has done with useless space in the Galaxy Tab 2. In essence, we'd have almost 1.5GB of RAM.
Feasible? Yes/No? I realize that dinking with partitions can damage my HD+. It's a risk I'm willing to take.
I'm not going to get involved with this, I'm just going to add a warning. The partition structure for the HD/HD+ is different than the Nook Color and most other devices. The NC and other devices like SDs use DOS partitioning. The HD/HD+ is like the Nook Tablet that uses GPT partitioning. The two partitioning schemes are not compatible. So don't try to use my tools in the NC forum. If you want to know more about GPT partitioning on the Nook Tablet and get some tools, search the Nook Tablet forum.
Sent from my BN NookHD+ using XDA Premium HD app
leapinlar said:
The partition structure for the HD/HD+ is different than the Nook Color and most other devices. The NC and other devices like SDs use DOS partitioning. The HD/HD+ is like the Nook Tablet that uses GPT partitioning. The two partitioning schemes are not compatible.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Good to know! Now we have more data than we had before.
Looks like a lot of the work has been done already
So, I found this thread in the xda forums all about nook tablet partitions. They even talk about resizing! (Or at least, about making a different size /userdata partition.)
There is also this here about repartitioning Nook partitions.
Looks like parted would be easier for what I'm looking to do, shrink the /factory partition and create a new partition.
I read here that I can use a live Linux CD to mount the factory.img. From there, I presume I can delete the factory.zip and create a new image?
I'm not a linux geek, but I presume I need to be on a live Mint CD to use parted in ADB? (Update: Apparently I am to use the Android SDK for ADB in Windows. Downloaded already. Am climbing the steep learning curve.)
First half of Step 1, Done
Well, it took longer than it should have, but I made a new, smaller factory7.partition.img file. It's 1 MB.
I started by booting a Mint 16 Live CD.
Then I mounted the OEM factory partition image I made beforehand using the dd command, per leapinlar's instructions. (See his Item 16.)
Code:
sudo mount -o loop partition7.factory.img {some.folder}
That image contained 4 zips: factory,zip; fsck.zip; rombackup.zip; romrestore.zip.
Dummy me, I tried deleting the factory.zip inside the mounted image. It occurred to me later that that would be like trying to delete a file from a mounted CDROM's iso image. Can't be done.
So I copied the 4 zips to a new folder. Then I could deleted factory zip, which was 433.3 MB.
That left less than 1MB for the other 3 zips.
If there's an elegant way of modifying an .img and resaving it, I couldn't find it. (I spent a lot of time with mkfs.yaffs2. But this .img was not a yaffs.(Didn't pass a "sanity check" when I tried to mount the new .img I had made with mkfs.yaffs2.)
So I brute forced an imaging solution by copying the 3 copied zips to a 1MB ext4 partiton on a USB stick. (I made the partition with gparted and used chmod 777 to clear permissions in the partition.)
Then I made an image of the new 1MB partition using the dd command. In my case
Code:
sudo dd if=/dev/sdd2 of=new.partition7.factory.img
(I probably don't have the leading /'s right here. Am truly hacking my way through all this. I'm sure most of you could do this whole project in a few minutes.)
So now I have a shiny new 1MB custom factory image just wating to be used.
Update: I think I'll redo this, and leave 4 zips, in case the recovery mechanism is looking for a "factory.zip" I'll made a dummy file and archive it, calling it "factory.zip."
The next task is to get ADB working, delete the original large partition7 in the HD+, create a new 1MB partition7 in its place, and then restore my new image to partition 7 using the dd command in reverse.
After that, then to create partition11 out of the unallocated 432MB and format that as swap.
Update: It occurs to me that I will have to backup partitions 8, 9, and 10 with dd. Then I'll have to destroy them, recreate them in new locations, and then restore them. Fortunately, an xda developer has already written the instructions on how to do all this.
I see that CM 10 supports swapon, so I'm hoping it will be downhill after the partition work. I'm hoping CM will automagically find the new swap partition, once I enable swap.
If you know different, I'd appreciate hearing from you. Will using swap in this memory burn the memory out quickly?
Better yet, swap file instead of swap partition
So, I was thinking more about this idea and how I'd have to destroy and recreate p8, p9 and p10 to make a new swap partition at p11. Aside from that being a lot of work and more prone to errors with all those operations, a new p11 would never get TRIM'd by the OS.
So now the plan is to reduce /factory (p7) to 1MB and increase /system (p8) by 443 MB. Then I'll put a swap file in /system.
Only have to work on two partitions that way and /system gets TRIM'd. (Or at least Lagfix will trim it.)
Whatdaya think?
I suppose it's easy enough to put a swap file in /data to get a feel if there's any performance gain from swap in eMMC. Someone wanna show me the code to do this? (I've read about how to create a swap file. Not sure how to mount it at emmcblk10.) Never mind, Found it on xda! Am currently running 500MB swap on /data to see what it's like.
PMikeP said:
So, I was thinking more about this idea and how I'd have to destroy and recreate p8, p9 and p10 to make a new swap partition at p11. Aside from that being a lot of work and more prone to errors with all those operations, a new p11 would never get TRIM'd by the OS.
So now the plan is to reduce /factory (p7) to 1MB and increase /system (p8) by 443 MB. Then I'll put a swap file in /system.
Only have to work on two partitions that way and /system gets TRIM'd. (Or at least Lagfix will trim it.)
Whatdaya think?
I suppose it's easy enough to put a swap file in /data to get a feel if there's any performance gain from swap in eMMC. Someone wanna show me the code to do this? (I've read about how to create a swap file. Not sure how to mount it at emmcblk10.) Never mind, Found it on xda! Am currently running 500MB swap on /data to see what it's like.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I guess this is a dumb question, but if you can put a swap file in /system and /data, why can't you delete the factory.zip from /factory and put the swap there? Why create a new partition?
Sent from my BN NookHD+ using XDA Premium HD app
leapinlar said:
I guess this is a dumb question, but if you can put a swap file in /system and /data, why can't you delete the factory.zip from /factory and put the swap there? Why create a new partition?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
First, I'm abandoning my bright idea. Turns out that swap is slow (even on eMMC) and possibly destructive to the eMMC with all the writes. (Hmmm . . . I wonder how many writes /cache gets compared to a swap file? (IOW, would a swap file be any more destructive than cache is?))
There were 1 second pauses every now and then, presumably while swapping when I had a swap file mounted in /data. Even tho I could get more free memory with a swap file than with zRAM, zRAM is much faster. And since zRAM is supported by the OS, it's the path of least resistance for me.
But to answer your question, it's not a dumb question. I'm a dumb user.
First, I don't know how to mount the /swap on the /factory partition. Can it be done? I don't see /factory in root explorer when running. Whereas I can see /system and /data. (So, to use Windows talk, it seems like /factory is "hidden" when running the OS?) By the same token, I don't know if I can delete the factory.zip from /factory in situ. If it can be done, it probably requires ADB and fastboot (?). But I haven't learned about those yet. So I'd have to use my new image trick, from my post above, to "delete" factory.zip from /factory.
Second, even if I could mount a swap in /factory, I don't think I'd want to. (Although I agree it's be a lot easier (and less dangerous) than deleting and recreating partitions.) I don't think /factory gets TRIM' by the OS. And I presume I would want it TRIM'd every now and then or else the swap would get slower over time than it already is.
I notice that Lagfix offers to trim /system and /data (and /cache). But not /factory. As above, if /factory is not visible during operation of the OS, that would be one reason why Lagfix doesn't trim it.
Or it could simply be that Lagfix doesn't see the need to trim /factory. Since /factory is supposed to be static, there wouldn't be any reason for Lagfix (or CM) to trim it.
Whether /factory can be trimmed with the fstrim command while running, I don't know.
Anyway, my idea for swap wasn't such a good idea. So I've abandoned the idea.
It still bugs me, as an engineer who compulsively tries to optimize everything, to carry that wasted 443 MB around in /factory.
I don't think we need an extra 443 MB in /system or /data. (Or /cache.) But if we ever do, we know where to find it.
/factory is not automatically mounted in stock or CM. So to get access to it you would need to mount it with a script command. And I would assume you need script commands to set up /swap so that should not be a problem. But /factory is formatted fat32 and /data and /system are ext4 so that might interfere too.
And manual trim commands can be run to trim the mounted /factory. You don't need the app lagfix to do it.
But I agree, I'm not really sure you gain anything with swap on this device.
Edit: as PMikeP pointed out to me in a PM, I was mistaken. /factory is ext4, not fat 32. Thanks for the correction. That should make it easier.
Sent from my BN NookHD+ using XDA Premium HD app
Hello folks. Before going further I need to apologize. I really fighted to use Link2SD on my Galaxy tablet and I succeeded more or less. I thought that my tentative could be useful to others. So I posted this topic.
I worked a little more, and now I am convinced that I was wrong from the beginning.
The reality is that Apps2SD and Link2SD are obsolete utilities.
Forget creating a second volume on your external SD Card :
- Android/Samsung declare your SD Card as corrupted and always wants to reformat it.
- TWRP mounts the wrong partition and you have to manually unmout it and remount the good one
- The partitions need to be declared with a wrong type and this is really not clean
etc...
I suggest that you do not loose your time, forget Link2SD, and read this excellent topic:
https://www.xda-developers.com/divi...gles-fuse-replacement-will-reduce-io-overhead
My Galaxy tab A has only 11 Go available for the user. I bought a 128 Go external SD card to extend both /storage/emulated/0 and /data.
When you first install your SD Card, Android automatically mount this card as /storage/xxxx-xxxx.
This is a FAT volume extended on all your SD Card (128 GB for me).
This is fine for storing ebooks, music, video, and your backups.
But impossible for Link2SD to move your apps on this volume and put a symbolic link on the previous location, because FAT is not a UNIX file system. Link2SD (or Apps2SD) needs a second disk volume on partition 2 (/dev/block/mmcblk1p2) formatted with a UNIX file system (ext4 is fine).
Of course you need to have rooted your device. [A non rooted tablet is not better than a vulgar iPhone ]
To re-partition my SD Card I used ROEHSOFT PARTITION TOOL (SD-USB). (I tried unsuccessfully Aparted, it crashed every time I launch it). ROEHSOFT is convenient but tricky to be used by an advanced user :
- You cannot create a partition in a specific slot (for example /dev/block/mmcblk1p2): It automatically use first slot for the first partition you create, the second slot for the following partition, and so on.
- If you try to foul it, deleting a partition and recreating it in another empty space, it suddenly decides to reorganize your 4 slots. It really wants /dev/block/mmcblk1p1 to be the first partition on your SD Card, /dev/block/mmcblk1p2 the following, etc...
- You cannot create a partition at a specific offset inside an empty space.
After fighting with ROEHSOFT I finally won. I discovered too late that "fdisk" is part of BusyBox. If you know "fdisk" my advice is to use it instead of fighting with a software which pretends to be user friendly but is too limited.
OK, stop bla-bla and work.
1 - Dismount your SD Card : Parameters/Device Maintenance/Storage/Menu-Storage Parameter/Dismount
2 - Delete the only one partition
3 - For a misterious reason, my Android was not happy with his FAT volume on /dev/block/mmcblk1p1. Link2SD wants his UNIX volume on /dev/block/mmcblk1p2. So, if you use ROEHSOFT you need now to create a small dummy partition on /dev/block/mmcblk1p1. For me I created a 4 Go partition to be used by Linux Deploy. This partition needs to be declared as FAT32 (LBA) but should not be formatted as a FAT file system. EXT4 is a good choice.
4 - Create the second partition for Link2SD. I suggest not too much space for it, because you probably want a huge space for the third partion. This partition needs to be declared as FAT32 (LBA) but should be formatted with a UNIX file system. EXT4 is a good choice.
5 - Create the third partition to be used as SD extension for Android. This partition should be very large : you will store on it your music, your movies, your ebooks, and above all your backups. This partition needs to be declared as FAT32 (LBA). I formatted this partition as a EXFAT file system.
6 - Reboot. If you are lucky you will get two notifications : one saying that you have a corrupted memory card, and one saying that you are ready for media files. You will get those two notifications at each reboot.
8 - Recreate mounting scripts inside Lin2SD (or Apps2SD), and reboot.
7 - If you are a UNIX user just type "df -h" in a terminal to verify that the two partitions are mounted with correct sizes).
8 - You can look what Android think of your partitioning :
/Parameters/Device Maintenance/Storage/Menu:Storage Parameter/.
Do not try to mount the two first volumes and NEVER try to reformat them with Android. Those volumes are declared as corrupted but this is normal. Android does not expect to find a UNIX file system on a partition declared FAT32.
If one day, you forget this and ask to Android to reformat a corrupted partition you will have the terrible surprise that Android will not only erase your partition, but will erase everything and recreate one and only one big empty partition. (I guess that you keep all your backups on this SD Card, like me, so this is a really bad surprise).
Do not ask me why Android does not want his SD-Card on first partition. I have no idea. I guess that Android or Samsung reserve this partition for something else.
Do not ask why I had to declared all my partitions as FAT32 even if two of them are formatted as EXT4. I just realized that this configuration works well after fighting during a full day.
I hope that this topic will help some of you.
You really need the second partition on the SD? Or you can have only one ex4 partition that fills all the SD? (Remove the FAT and only have one ext4)
Palatosino said:
You really need the second partition on the SD? Or you can have only one ex4 partition that fills all the SD? (Remove the FAT and only have one ext4)
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No, I tried but it doesn't work.
I found today a very interesting topic that I will try to master and hopefully wil, understand everything better :
https://www.xda-developers.com/divi...gles-fuse-replacement-will-reduce-io-overhead
Maybe I was wrong from the beginning : perhaps LinkSD and apps2SD are historic patch that are not useful anymore. Perhaps all the burden will be fixed easily just by not using those utilities anymore.
"sdcardfs" is something very new for me who is an old UNIX fellow. This seems to be a major improvement for Android.
I will update this topic when everything will be clear for me.
I didnt have this problem on android 6, but on android 7 . My phone wants to use ext4 as data partition and says its corrupted, link2sd detects this second partition normally, but my data partition fat 32 detected on phone settings and its says its ready but there is no option to mount it.
As far as i understand from this tutorial i need to make 1 fake ext4 partition say 1mb, then second partition ext4 for use with link2sd, and third partition fat32 for use as data storage ??
My phone is samsung j7 2016
So i did follow this , but now my phone wont detect fat32 and link2sd didnt detect 1 of other ext4 partitions
Looking for a definitive way to Root and use link2sd to have my SM-T580 use the SD as a primary parition for apps and data. Been researching and trying a dozen different methods already to no avail. Bonus if there's a way to roll it back easily. Am on the latest android release.
Thank you for all replies.
larpoux said:
I hope that this topic will help some of you.
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Click to collapse
You're my saviour, thank you ! I've been fighting on the same issue for days and didn't think about that trick to declare an ext partition as FAT32 !
I know you probably won't see this, but I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciated this guide.
I have a Galaxy Tab S3 and every since going to a custom rom, I haven't been able to get this working which was such a pain with less than 23 gb of storage. The Rom improved my performance far too much for me to change back and every guide I attempted pointed me in the wrong direction but finally, I'm able to use my 120 gb SD card which has made my tablet worth using again.
To anyone who may attempt in the future,
I'm using Android 9 + Magisk. Using the Advanced type Mount script was the only way it get it functioning but I've had no issues with linking apps and no message regarding a corrupted SD card. It can take a few minutes on boot for everything to properly load in, but the apps all update and there's no performance/loading time issues.
Thanks again!