Related
Since previous thread was locked, figured id try again in a new section...
Ok folks, I left the android scene about 2 months ago, and when I came back, theres ROMs coming quicker than I can handle, and all of a sudden I have at least 5 to choose from, including multiple methods to obtain Apps2Sd.
I decided to try the new "Hero w/Rosie" build, and well it looks pretty nice from the pictures, but its a b**ch to put on the phone. I have a PVT Android G1, newest radio, newest SPL (Haykuro's) and newest recovery, with the tweaks. I also have a linux distro and paragon partition manager, all the required tools (besides the actual ROM and the app_s)
So I have the card partitioned, ext2 and one fat32. I also have the apps2sd located on root of the fat32 partition. I followed Lawrences tutorial for installing and when it came down to typing the commands in terminal to copy the app_s to the /system/sd, it stops withing 2 minutes to tell me theres no space left.
So I tried copying the app_s on the actual ext2 partition (Spent a good 4 hours getting Windows 7, Windows XP, and Ubuntu 9.04 to boot through my bootloader) and still no luck, whats even worse is my sd card cant be used at all by the phone. Ignoring the new problems, I typed busybox df -h and to my surprise, /system/sd did not exist, hence my ext2 partition wasnt being picked up at all by the phone....
Im at a complete halt and have NO clue what to do next, can anyone lend me some of their time and help me?
The modified boot image should automatically detect the ext2 partition and mount it if you did the partitioning correctly.
If it's not mounted, /system/sd is just a normal folder under /system, which explains the not enough space problem.
What you should do is check whether the EXT2 partition is the SECOND partition on your SD card and it should be a MAIN not EXTENDED partition.
Ironically, ive done that as well.... I used paragon to make an extended partition in the beginning and that didnt work, so then i tried it again at the end. Both did not work, but I shall try again and let you know how it goes. Maybe my SD card is shot, since it doesnt want to work at all....
Ill post as soon as I try again
Well... amazingly it worked this time! Surprisingly, I did the same steps as I have been doing, but I'm guessing this time what made the difference was extracting the app_s in linux and then copying it straight to, then unmounting both parititions. very odd, but thank you so much!
Hey guys,
I'm new to rooting my G1 but definitally not new to modding my electronics. I'm trying to set up my apps2sd but i'm having a little trouble. Trust me, I searched, I'm not a forum noob. My sdcard is already formatted in FAT32. I check my sdcard in settings on my phone and it shows almost 8gigs of available space and another area that says "sd card secondary" - unavailable.
I've looked at some tutorials and the first steps usually include typing this into Terminal Emulator.
su
mkdir /system/sd/app
I do this and this is what I get.
mkdir failed for /system/sd/app, read-only file system.
What seems to be the issue? Can I just mount the SDcard on my laptop and get on it and make a folder "system", then inside that folder "sd", and in that one "app"? Is this the manual way of doing it? Any help is greatly appreciated. I know you guys probably deal with stupid questions all the time. Thanks in advance.
Please read the stickies before posting. This should be in the Q&A forum.
Sorry I will post in the Q & A forum. Thanks for the good info, cleveland.
paolovazquez said:
Hey guys,
I'm new to rooting my G1 but definitally not new to modding my electronics. I'm trying to set up my apps2sd but i'm having a little trouble. Trust me, I searched, I'm not a forum noob. My sdcard is already formatted in FAT32. I check my sdcard in settings on my phone and it shows almost 8gigs of available space and another area that says "sd card secondary" - unavailable.
I've looked at some tutorials and the first steps usually include typing this into Terminal Emulator.
su
mkdir /system/sd/app
I do this and this is what I get.
mkdir failed for /system/sd/app, read-only file system.
What seems to be the issue? Can I just mount the SDcard on my laptop and get on it and make a folder "system", then inside that folder "sd", and in that one "app"? Is this the manual way of doing it? Any help is greatly appreciated. I know you guys probably deal with stupid questions all the time. Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You might want to search some more. If you only have a FAT32 parition you are never going to make Apps2sd work. You might get apps to vd working if that is the route you want to go. Seriously, there are 20 threads on this topic. I wouldn't say anything but you pulled the I know what I'm talking about card.
What ROM are you running? If it says "secondary card unavailable" you are probably using a modded ROM and not one of the copies of a carrier ROM. That means that apps 2 sd is most likely automated if you setup your SD card correctly.
paolovazquez said:
Hey guys,
I'm new to rooting my G1 but definitally not new to modding my electronics. I'm trying to set up my apps2sd but i'm having a little trouble. Trust me, I searched, I'm not a forum noob. My sdcard is already formatted in FAT32. I check my sdcard in settings on my phone and it shows almost 8gigs of available space and another area that says "sd card secondary" - unavailable.
I've looked at some tutorials and the first steps usually include typing this into Terminal Emulator.
su
mkdir /system/sd/app
I do this and this is what I get.
mkdir failed for /system/sd/app, read-only file system.
What seems to be the issue? Can I just mount the SDcard on my laptop and get on it and make a folder "system", then inside that folder "sd", and in that one "app"? Is this the manual way of doing it? Any help is greatly appreciated. I know you guys probably deal with stupid questions all the time. Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
go to: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=533731
install cyanogens recovery image if you havent yet, then format your card into Fat32, ext3 and if you like linux swap.
then get cyanogen 4.0.4 it will do apps to SD automaticaly
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.
Hi there,
Is there a way to make the add the internal SD card to the main memmory? So that there would not be an internal SD card anymore?
I do not mean swapping the moutpoints around so my External_SD becomes my primary and my internal my second....
I want to get rid of the internal one alltogether (adding it to main memory).
I figure that I'll have to format the storage in a certain way... would that do it?
Can someone tell me step by step what to do?
I do have CW-mod installed.
I did search the forum, but couldnt find anything conclusive. Just hints that it should be possible...
If there already is a thread where all this is explained, please point me to it, because I couldn't find it.
Thanks,
Pfeffa-rah
I don't think this is possible , never heard of someone who did it
I have no idea how to do that. My question is... why would you want to do that?
Having an internal_sd partition adds the benefit of having big app data (such as those in Gameloft games) sit in a very fast partition and still be called "sddata".
Also, it's mountable via PC so everything in there can still be backed up. So it's best of both worlds really.
This was discussed some time ago in this thread: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1013575
There were ideas on how to remount the cards at boot. I myself come to the conclusion that since more phones start to behave in this way, app developers will have to start dealing with it. It just sucks they are mostly slow on the uptake. My main problem was the Spotify cache location being hard coded so I resorted to hack the Spotify apk.
PS. salisbury_steak: What is it with people like you that every time someone has a question on how to do something, your immediate response is "But why would you want to do that?!".
sorech said:
PS. salisbury_steak: What is it with people like you that every time someone has a question on how to do something, your immediate response is "But why would you want to do that?!".
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That was actually an honest question.
I wanted to understand why he wanted to do it. (i.e. What would be the advantages of it.) There was no supposed sarcasm in there.
how about the ability to install 5x more applications?
Having that stupid 5gb partition as sd card and the real sd card as a sub folder is retarded...
My 32GB class 10 cars is a lot faster than the internal one.
The internal 5gb memory is MUCH TOO SMALL!!! Most apps don't allow you to store data on the external card. If you like me and many others install some games that download aditional data + a nav app that downloads maps for europe + some streaming music app like wimp that can cache music for offline play then you are ****ed with LG's setup.
The setup CM7 uses solves the main problem but effectively wastes the 5gb by mounting it at emmc where like 0,0001% of apps are able to access it.
So adding those otherwise wasted 5gb to the main memory would be great. But i have not seen any solution to that yet :-(
Thank you Gensplejs for explaining that to them. I had no idea how to reply to that since it seemed so obvious to me.
This thread was ment to be a question about how to do it and not to discuss the usefullness of it. That is where I lost the way in other threads...
So, thanks for your replys all (realy).
But now, back On-Topic:
How would I do it?
Sent from my LG-P990 using XDA Premium App
Please don't blame me if you tried it and you screwed up your phone.. It's your choice...
Well, I don't know if this would work, but this is how I would do it (accepting the fact that I'd loose almost 2GB of /data's free space):
1. Format your internal sd card to the same file system as your /data partition is (ext3 or ext4)
2. Copy every file from /data 1:1 to your sdcard (cp -R /data/* /sdcard)
3. I don't know when and where the partitions are mounted (maybe init.rc??)...anyways change the target there and let /data point to the internal sd card partition (so it is ensured that it is mounted automatically to the new location)
4. Reboot and keep your fingers crossed
I think i figured how to do it in theory. First we need some free space at our microsd to cp /data. Then we should repartition with fdisk /dev/block/mmcblk0p8 and p9 into one partition and change vold.fstab to mount only externalsd at /sdcard as we do when we swap partitions. In theory it should work but i cant test it right now or make a script since ve gone vacations and i dont have a pc to restore in case of error
I agree.. certain apps wont store to sdcard.. its better to use the whole 8gb as phone storage, and use external sdcard as default sdcard.
Sent from my LG-P990 using XDA App
What ive found till now is that sd swapping is easy. You can do it by tweaking only vold.fstab. But repatriationing is a pain in the ass. Looks like lg has "faulty" partitions or something and to do it you must mesh up with with almost half partitions.
I had to rebuilt boot lgdrm recovery data and sdcard to make em half work. So it probably isnt worth the trouble. Also I think init.rc is built on the boot. So just remounting internal sd to /data wont work either.
sectors is not space
it says 7996, so thats 8GB
i saw it in hurry. the brain sometimes belives whats he want to belive
sorry
New to XDA
Hello everybody,
I'm new to android and i'm trying to find out how to solve the problem posted in this thread.
I see you've got the awnser but i don't know how to do this.
I've been searching google and XDA for ever but i just can't find the awnser.
Could you make a step by step howto or point out to a post how to do this.
I mean converting your external sd to ext4 and change the mounting points.
I'm a complete nood, i didn't get adb to work on my pc, ext4 recovery is not for the p990 2x.
I've read something abbout changing fstap for swapping te mounting points for sdcard and emmc, witch is also ok for me, but formating to ext4... wel i frankly don't know how to do this.
I'm quite stuk on this.
The only partitioning experience i've got is Gparted in Ubuntu or repartitioning in Windows 7.
Thans in andvance!
Greetz,
JMG
http://android.modaco.com/topic/347...-partitions/page__gopid__1821791#entry1821791
check this
you can expand data partition , but there is a limitation of 1.75gb
Thanks davjan
Thanks davjan,
As far i can see it's indeed not worth it.
I wil have to go on and try to find out how to change the filesystem to ext4 and swap the internal and external sd.
That way i get more usable space instead of a big datastorage witch cannot contain program data.
But thanks for the quick reply.
Jean Michel Gaar said:
Thanks davjan,
As far i can see it's indeed not worth it.
I wil have to go on and try to find out how to change the filesystem to ext4 and swap the internal and external sd.
That way i get more usable space instead of a big datastorage witch cannot contain program data.
But thanks for the quick reply.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
what rom are you using? is your phone rooted?
swapping internal with internal sd is very easy
and most of the roms here on xda are ext4 , if you instal one of them they autoconvert to ext4
Jean Michel Gaar said:
Thanks davjan,
As far i can see it's indeed not worth it.
I wil have to go on and try to find out how to change the filesystem to ext4 and swap the internal and external sd.
That way i get more usable space instead of a big datastorage witch cannot contain program data.
But thanks for the quick reply.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I you read the link provided you'll see that it makes what you want: grow internal filesystem = lower SDcard usable space. The only thing is that it doesn't seem possible is to use the whole space: system limitation. 75Markus tried high /system and /data values and phone didn't work.
See in his Mediafire Folder, 'Nvflash + guide for changing Partitions:
http://www.mediafire.com/75markus
Ext4 is now common with custom ROMs (in fact all of them).
You should search in sd-ext partition system, which was designed to artificially expand filesystem on older phones using an 'ext' partition. I didn't heard anybody using this on O2X.
If you use CyanogenMod based ROMs, your external card will be mounted ad /sdcard by default.
Switching internal and external SD
Thanks guy's,
I'll check it out.
I've been using cyanogenmod 7.1 stable with vorkkernel 20110208.
But that gave me batterydrains while using maps and nextvid ate the same time (while i'm driving).
Now i'm trying MIUI 1.11.11 with latest swift extreme.
But MIUI is very buggy so i'm thinking of going back to CM.
The only thing is that my phone won't boot with the latest vorkkernel.