Everything about partitions...!!! - Galaxy 3 Themes and Apps

Everything about partitions...!!! - Galaxy 3 Themes and Apps

Clear your doubts guys!!!
Ok, so here's the deal, in a very longwinded way that should hopefully explain everything and answer ALL questions.
You have an SD card in your phone and, a bit like normal PC Hard Drives, you can "partition" them (split them into two or more sections of different filesystems). Normally, your SD card is just one big FAT32 partition, which is fine for storing your pics, messages, emails, etc.
Now, other then your Phone's SD card, your phone will have its own internal flash memory (or "NAND") storage. Tradditionally with Android, you could only install applications to this NAND storage, you cannot install them onto your SD card. So if you have an empty 32GB SD card, but only 5Mb of internal phone storage, you still wont be able to install many apps, if any at all.
This was done to protect the apps from things like piracy - it's not easy to access the location where apps are installed on your phone's internal storage (normally impossible without root), so you can't for example buy an app, copy it, refund it, then install it again.
Still, this is no good for those of us who like to install lots and lots of apps, legitimately, as we run out of internal storage very quickly.
So Google came up with a way to install apps to the SD card. A folder is created called something like .android_secure and this stores (I believe) encrypted versions of applications, but there's a few catches:
1) Apps aren't automatically stored here, you have to manually "move" them
2) Not all apps are capable of being moved, in fact most apps aren't, the developer needs to update their app and allow it. Some apps aren't and wont be updated and some developers may not want to allow it for whatever reason.
3) Not all app data is moved, most of it is but some data is left on your phone so many people still run out of internal storage quickly.
4) You can force ALL apps to be moved to this area by default, but it breaks incompatible ones - such as Widgets, which are unable to load due to the SD card not being "prepared".
So that's Froyo's version. Before Froyo existed, some very clever people came up with a thing called "Apps2SD". Remember I said that your SD card normally is one big FAT32 partition? Well, Apps2SD works by having your SD card patitioned into TWO filesystems. A normal FAT32 partition for your usual stuff and a secondary "EXT" partition. EXT is just a filesystem, like FAT32 or NTFS, but it's the filesystem used by Android internally. The SD card is normally FAT32 because it's a "universal" filesystem, that just about any machine will be able to read, whereas EXT filesystems are generally Linux only, but I digress.
EXT has several different versions. The most common one you'll see is ext3. The main difference between ext2 and ext3 is "journaling", which is just a fancy way of saying that should an operation (such as copying, writing or reading) be interrupted unexpectedly (say, by you turning your phone off), then no data should be lost or corrupted. You know how when you turn your phone on, it says "preparing SD card"? It takes a few minutes, but what it's actually doing is checking that the FAT32 partition hasn't been damaged, because FAT does NOT have journaling. If you used a computer back in the Windows 98 days, you may remember that lovely blue "Scandisk" screen that had to run every time you didn't shut your computer down correctly - that's the same thing. But then Windows 2000/XP came along with NTFS, which also has journaling, meaning you had less chance of loosing data. But I digress once more.
So you have your SD card partitioned into EXT and FAT32. Generally it doesn't matter if it's ext3 or ext4, but you don't get any real advantage with ext4 over ext3 in this instance. Apps2SD then runs a special script on your phone which "symbolically links" the folder from your phone's internal storage where your apps are normally stored, to the ext partition on your SD card. A symbolic link is a bit like a shortcut for folders, except it's transparent to the OS: In other words, Android doesn't know that when it's installing it's apps to the internal phone storage, it's actually being stored on the SD card. This effectively boosts your internal phone memory from the previous 5mb that you had in my example above, up to whatever size you made the ext partition on your SD card (often 512Mb or 1Gb, but it depends on how many apps you install).
Plus, because it's "journaled", it doesn't need to be "prepared", meaning it's ready to go as soon as the phone starts - so your widgets and apps work immediately (unlike "forced" Froyo Apps2SD, where widgets disappear).
The catch with Apps2SD is that whatever space the ext partition takes up is taken away from the SD card. So if you have a 4Gb card (with something like 3.5Gb of actual storage) and you make a 512Mb ext partition, your SD card will "shrink" to 3Gb. The space isn't actually lost, it's just being used by the ext partition. If you reformat your card, you'll get it back.
Finally, there's a difference between "Apps2SD" and "Apps2SD+". Remember I said that your apps are stored on a special folder inside your Phone's NAND storage? Well, that was a bit of a lie. It's actually stored in TWO places. There's a second area which is called the Davlik Cache. You don't really need to worry about what this is for (Hint: IT's to do with the Java runetime your phone uses to run apps), all you need to know is that apps use it to store data, which also eats up internal phone memory. Apps2SD+ moves davlik cache to the ext partition on your SD card as well, freeing up even more space. Some people believe that this may come at the cost of performance, as the internal NAND memory should be faster than your SD card (Which is why you also get people arguing over which "class" SD card is better for Apps2SD - the logic being that a faster SD card means less impact from this move), but the truth of the matter is that your applications will be running from your Phone's RAM anyway, so performance isn't really impacted at all. Since most apps are only a few hundred Kb's in size, or a couple of MB at the most, it's a non-issue.
Finally, any recent version of Apps2SD/Apps2SD+ should work with an SD card that is or isn't formatted with an ext partition. It'll check for this partition when your phone first boots and if it's not there, just use internal phone storage.
Having an ext partition WITHOUT Apps2SD+ shouldn't cause any issues, either, so you can format your SD card whenever you're ready.
So in summary:
Apps2SD "fakes" your phone's internal memory and puts it all on a hidden section of your SD card.
Apps2SD+ pushes even more content to the SD card, freeing up even more space on the phone itself.
"Froyo" Apps2SD has various limitations that "old" apps2SD does not, but is much easier to handle as it doesn't involve any kind of "partitioning".
IF U LIKE HIT THANKS

Good idea, mate

Related

[Q] SD-Card, apps

Since android is on the storage card, does that mean that apps that are not developed to be stored on the SD-card is being stored in the SD-card anyways? I.e. will the operating system think that the root of the external memory is the internal memory? Cuz that would be great, having such a low internal memory in the HD2 to begin with..

Luggruff said:
Since android is on the storage card, does that mean that apps that are not developed to be stored on the SD-card is being stored in the SD-card anyways? I.e. will the operating system think that the root of the external memory is the internal memory? Cuz that would be great, having such a low internal memory in the HD2 to begin with..
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That is what the data.img file that is created when you 1st boot is for, it's also stored on the SDCard. After the NAND loader is released, you'll be able to have some that data so that it can be stored on the phone's internal memory, except the kernel last I heard. Right now the only difference between Nand and SD is that nand is a little bit faster, but you can speed up SD card by getting a higher class card, (instead of a class 2, then get a Class 6) the speed that the device boots is noticeably faster.

the data.img file is treated as "internal memory" for program storage. This file is physically located at the SD card but seen as another storage location. Since there are different flavours of this data.img available (512MB,1GB,2GB) you can easily store hundreds of apps without worrying about phone memory limitations or apps who fail to app2sd (in fact, none of the apps will move to sd on my phone, /care) So indeed, the HD2's internal mem is no problem here.

xhanay said:
That is what the data.img file that is created when you 1st boot is for, it's also stored on the SDCard. After the NAND loader is released, you'll be able to have some that data so that it can be stored on the phone's internal memory, except the kernel last I heard. Right now the only difference between Nand and SD is that nand is a little bit faster, but you can speed up SD card by getting a higher class card, (instead of a class 2, then get a Class 6) the speed that the device boots is noticeably faster.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Got the kingston 16GB Class 10 card, no problems
MrDroopy said:
the data.img file is treated as "internal memory" for program storage. This file is physically located at the SD card but seen as another storage location. Since there are different flavours of this data.img available (512MB,1GB,2GB) you can easily store hundreds of apps without worrying about phone memory limitations or apps who fail to app2sd (in fact, none of the apps will move to sd on my phone, /care) So indeed, the HD2's internal mem is no problem here.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks, that's awesome.
Though, somehow I see a constant drop inte my 'real' internal memory. I've got a en rom wich i only touch att launch android..

Understanding Android Storage

I don't understand storage on Android and how it works. I would be grateful if someone could explain it.
Normally I thought that Phone memory refers to the storage space on the phone (like ROM) that was fixed and not removable. SD card is the microsd card that I physically insert into a slot on the phone. However, it seems that Android has 3 types of storage: Phone, Internal SD and External SD. Is this correct? I would appreciate if someone could clarify. Also, when I do move Apps to SD card on my CyanogenMod ROM, it seems to only move them from phone memory to internal SD, not external SD. As a general rule, is is better in terms of speed to keep the apps on internal or external SD? I don't want to keep in Phone memory since it is quite small, only about 1.8 GB. I should point out that I am using a Class 10 MicroSD, so it should be quite fast, or so I've been told.

What you refer to as Internal SD is probably not on the SD at all but read/write memory in the device itself. Basically built in storage that's an addition to the read only memory where the important stuff is.
As an example, the Omnia i900 had ROM + 8GB Storage in the Phone, with whatever you wanted to add as External SD. Plug the Omnia into a PC and you had two lot's of storage that you could drag and drop files to.

Basically you have 3 things:
ROM (Read-Only-Memory): This is where Android itself resides. All the OS stuff is here.
Phone Storage: You may consider this as the phones HDD. This is where all the apps/SMS/MMS/... are stored. (This is usually not meant to be accessed by the user to place files there, thats what the SD-Card is for)
SD-Storage: Your SD-Card where you can put everything you want. Music/Pictures/Files...

m0jo said:
Basically you have 3 things:
SD-Storage: Your SD-Card where you can put everything you want. Music/Pictures/Files...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Is it possible to run apps off the SD-Card? When I use an app like App2SD, does it actually copy to the SD Card or just to the Phone storage? This is what confuses me, because I selected 'move to SD' on my phone (I'm using Cyanogen 7.1.0). But its still in the Phone Storage. I know this because when I put the SD card into my laptop, it does not show any of the software files.

When you move apps to the SD not all data is moved to the SD. The phone needs some files on the internal storage to run, since it needs to know that the apps are installed on the phone. When it needs to run it'll find the executable files in the internal storage, and run the data files from the SD card. Much like on a computer when you've installed an application and install it on an external HDD.
Apps you move to the SD will be moved to /Android/data/ and /data i believe since i have quite a bit of appdata in these folders.

Internal SD vs External SD

It's a noobish question, but I'm still a bit confused as to the internal vs external sd card usage. I know that in some ROMs (currently using SHOstock) the internal 12GB sd is under /mnt/sdcard and the external is under /mnt/sdcard/external_sd, but I never can get anything to use the external card. Why do we have the ability to stick one in our phones if none of our apps can be moved there? The only thing I've been able to use it for is Vignette or things like that where the app configuration allows you to browse to what folder you'd like to use for storage.
What I'm getting at, is that I'd like to move the apps themselves to the external SD, because I have the ability to put a 32GB card in, as opposed to the 12GB internal. Is this possible?
Another related question - TiBu sees my external card's free space, but whenever I use the App2SD function to move it to the "external" card, it moves it to the internal card. Anyone know how to fix this? I'm guessing that it has to do with no ext4 partition on the external SD, but I could be wrong. If that's the case, we're out of luck unless we're running Linux boxes, correct? If that's the case, then I return to my original question - what is the point of having an external SD card if the only thing you can put on it is pictures and/or manually move stuff over using a file explorer app?

The point is to store large media files like movies.
TiBu will also save to external SD.
Note that some apps use the newer Android standard for internal/sdcard mountpoints (/emmc for internal, /sdcard for external), which Samsung does NOT follow. (CyanogenMod, however, does follow this standard.)

Entropy512 said:
TiBu will also save to external SD.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thats a negative. TiBu save files are stored in internal.
Main bonus for having external sdcard for me, is the abilitiy to store pictures and videos. Anything that is no on external sdcard will be lost if the phone gets broken.

They save to internal as default but you can change it to the external SD in the settings options.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk

MotoMudder77 said:
Thats a negative. TiBu save files are stored in internal.
Main bonus for having external sdcard for me, is the abilitiy to store pictures and videos. Anything that is no on external sdcard will be lost if the phone gets broken.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you noticed he said "will" which means it has the capability. It's in TiBu settings.. You can move them to your external sdcard with TiBu as well...
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I777 using xda premium

MotoMudder77 said:
Thats a negative. TiBu save files are stored in internal.
Main bonus for having external sdcard for me, is the abilitiy to store pictures and videos. Anything that is no on external sdcard will be lost if the phone gets broken.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's not true - you can have TiBu save backups to external storage in the settings menu - you just browse to where you want it to save it.
In either case, so really, just to move movies and other large media over to it? Nothing (aside from the few cases) automatically? Like I can't move apps over to it? It has to be the internal? To me that mostly defeats the purpose of having external storage.

DJLittleMike said:
That's not true - you can have TiBu save backups to external storage in the settings menu - you just browse to where you want it to save it.
In either case, so really, just to move movies and other large media over to it? Nothing (aside from the few cases) automatically? Like I can't move apps over to it? It has to be the internal? To me that mostly defeats the purpose of having external storage.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Where do you store your. Nandroid backups? I use the external card for that as well, along with TiBu backups, photos and videos. I sure as hell would not want all of that stuff on the internal storage?
Sent from my GT-I9100 using xda premium

... I'll try to answer the OP question. However, I haven't been around android long enough for this to be an authoritive answer. It's more along the lines of a guess...
The reason for the whacky naming is historical. Back in the early days of android, devices only had a small amount of user storage. It was generally mounted as "/data" and was probably 1-2 GB in size. This area was limited to storing application specific data (and downloaded applications.) Same examples might be your contacts list, your high score in angry birds, etc.
Many of those phones had a SDCard slot, however. Actually, many of the phones not only had the slot, but came with a card as well. The idea was that you could put music files, photo's, etc on this extra sdcard. A user could easily upgrade the card to whatever size was supported by android. In development terms, this became known as the external sdcard (or external memory) because it was user accessible and not required for the device to function. Traditionally, it was mounted as "/sdcard"
As time went on, more and more phones came with this extra storage. At some point, it was no longer user accessible or removable. However, it was still used the same way and for the same purpose (afterall, why would you need more than 1-2 GB for just app storage?) It's still mounted as /sdcard. When you move applications from "internal storage" to "external storage" you are really moving the bulk of the app data from /data to /sdcard.
Of course, competition goes on, and everyone wants to have the biggest and greatest phone. So, why not do something done before and go BACK to adding a user accessible memory card slot in ADDITION to the existing /sdcard "external memory"? The only problem is that android doesn't really have a proper way to address that, so different phones mount it in different ways. For some, it might be "/sdcard2". For others, it might be mounted as a sub directory of /sdcard (sdcard/ext_storage, etc)
Of course, this causes all kind of problems for programs designed to work on both older phones (where /sdcard was actually external) and newer phones (where /sdcard is built in.)
There are efforts with newer versions of android to try and correct this, but legacy stuff holds us back. In honeycomb (and ICS), "/data" and "/sdcard" are actually the same partition. In fact, "/sdcard" actually points to "/data/media." They use the same space, however. There's no longer a concept of "external memory." (However, its still confusing because programs are usually written to work for many different versions of android.)
Want to make things more confusing? Add in CWM Recovery. In that recovery, "sdcard" refers to the /sdcard partition that is often called "external" memory in android development. Then it refers to "internal sdcard" when talking about any additional memory card that is user accessible. (so "sdcard" is built in memory, and "internal sdcard" is the sdcard that's physically external.)
Confused yet? Me too.
Gary

garyd9 said:
... I'll try to answer the OP question. However, I haven't been around android long enough for this to be an authoritive answer. It's more along the lines of a guess...
The reason for the whacky naming is historical. Back in the early days of android, devices only had a small amount of user storage. It was generally mounted as "/data" and was probably 1-2 GB in size. This area was limited to storing application specific data (and downloaded applications.) Same examples might be your contacts list, your high score in angry birds, etc.
Many of those phones had a SDCard slot, however. Actually, many of the phones not only had the slot, but came with a card as well. The idea was that you could put music files, photo's, etc on this extra sdcard. A user could easily upgrade the card to whatever size was supported by android. In development terms, this became known as the external sdcard (or external memory) because it was user accessible and not required for the device to function. Traditionally, it was mounted as "/sdcard"
As time went on, more and more phones came with this extra storage. At some point, it was no longer user accessible or removable. However, it was still used the same way and for the same purpose (afterall, why would you need more than 1-2 GB for just app storage?) It's still mounted as /sdcard. When you move applications from "internal storage" to "external storage" you are really moving the bulk of the app data from /data to /sdcard.
Of course, competition goes on, and everyone wants to have the biggest and greatest phone. So, why not do something done before and go BACK to adding a user accessible memory card slot in ADDITION to the existing /sdcard "external memory"? The only problem is that android doesn't really have a proper way to address that, so different phones mount it in different ways. For some, it might be "/sdcard2". For others, it might be mounted as a sub directory of /sdcard (sdcard/ext_storage, etc)
Of course, this causes all kind of problems for programs designed to work on both older phones (where /sdcard was actually external) and newer phones (where /sdcard is built in.)
There are efforts with newer versions of android to try and correct this, but legacy stuff holds us back. In honeycomb (and ICS), "/data" and "/sdcard" are actually the same partition. In fact, "/sdcard" actually points to "/data/media." They use the same space, however. There's no longer a concept of "external memory." (However, its still confusing because programs are usually written to work for many different versions of android.)
Want to make things more confusing? Add in CWM Recovery. In that recovery, "sdcard" refers to the /sdcard partition that is often called "external" memory in android development. Then it refers to "internal sdcard" when talking about any additional memory card that is user accessible. (so "sdcard" is built in memory, and "internal sdcard" is the sdcard that's physically external.)
Confused yet? Me too.
Gary
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
To expand on Gary's comments here a little bit - I came to the SGS2 from an HTC Aria, which was released roughly 18 months ago (I didn't bother to look up the exact date). This was the first 'decent' Android device available on AT&T.
*ducks the flamethrower blasts from backflip owners*
The Aria had no internal SD storage (or more appropriately named EMMC I guess) and stock had 185MB - yes MB - user available app storage on /data. Needless to say, that is pretty severely limiting as far as app storage goes. To make this even more fun, the phone shipped with Android 2.1 (Eclair) which had NO built in provisions for apps to SD.
Thankfully, the dev community got us a FroYo port fairly quickly - so at least we had Android built-in apps to SD at that point. However, if you take a look at any apps you have Apps2SD'ed on your device, you'll see that in many cases, only about half of the storage cost of these apps actually gets moved to your SD card (internal in the case of the SGS2, external on the Aria).
Later, via CM6 and still later in CM7 we got the ability to move apps to an ext partition on SD cards (this may have eventually been possible at some point on HTC based roms as well, I can't recall). The downside to this was the requirement to "trick" the OS into seeing that ext partition on the external SD card as part of the device's internal storage, and it also meant that putting apps there was an all-or-nothing option. Therefore, if you wanted to switch external SD cards, you had to have a linux box to make a copy of the ext partition on one card, and put it on the other card, or all your apps were gone. This was a royal pain in the arse. On the Aria, I typically ran a 1 GB ext partition on an 8Gb card, and stored both my apps and dalvik cache there.
I currently have a bunch of apps on my SGS2 that I never use, but since I'm only using about 500MB of the available 2GB of internal app storage, I dont' bother to delete them. I don't run a ton of games, but the only time I'd think you'd even want to consider the hassle of moving apps to an ext partion on an external card with the SGS2 would be if you are running out of the internal app storage on /data. It's not getting used for anything at all if you move apps to the external card. If you're committed to doing this though, I'd guess if you grabbed a CM7 build for the SGS2 and an app called S2E in the market, you could probably do it.
sorry for the novel.....
DD

We need to mount another 16GB card and figure a way to RAID em for faster access..
Edit: yeah been drinking again...
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I777 using xda premium

garyd9 said:
Want to make things more confusing? Add in CWM Recovery. In that recovery, "sdcard" refers to the /sdcard partition that is often called "external" memory in android development. Then it refers to "internal sdcard" when talking about any additional memory card that is user accessible. (so "sdcard" is built in memory, and "internal sdcard" is the sdcard that's physically external.)
Confused yet? Me too.
Gary
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This was mainly due to the fact that the Android standards got firmed up during the development of CWM 5.x (which is where support for the "internal" sdcard was first implemented)
Initially, CWM only supported one sdcard - and nearly all integrators chose this to be the internal memory.
Then later in 5.x, CWM added support for external/internal sdcards, following the new Android standard of internal on /emmc and external (but not labeled as such) on /sdcard
The problem is - almost all CWM implementations at this point used /sdcard for the internal mount point.
So the choice when I upgraded to CWM 5.0.2.7 was:
Leave things swapped as is and have the "internal" mislabeled (I had not yet figured out how to build CWM from source at this point)
Swap things and have tons of people be like, "WHERE MAI BACKUPZ?"
I'm thinking of doing the swap next time I update CWM - which might be later this weekend.

Entropy512 said:
I'm thinking of doing the swap next time I update CWM - which might be later this weekend.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'd suggest not directly swapping. The confusion for people switching between different devices with CWM Recovery would be annoying. (I could even see it confusing an experienced user when they jump between different devices that both have CWM Recovery, but use opposite labels.)
Instead of redefining existing terms, it might make things easier to understand if you replace the string "internal sdcard" with a different, but non-conflicting term, such as: "microSD card" or "replaceable sdcard." When a user sees two options, such as "backup to sdcard" and "backup to replaceable sdcard", it's more obvious which one is which. (Of course, "backup to built-in memory" would be even more clear for the former option.)
Take care
Gary

Great info, thanks to all. Now let me throw in another term, "USB Storage." I ran across this in file manager after I had done a complete factory wipe, cache wipe, format, et al. In "USB Storage" was several files I had thought were on the 16Mb Class 6 microSDHC I had just formatted. So, where does this fit in the grand scheme?

BadElf said:
Great info, thanks to all. Now let me throw in another term, "USB Storage." I ran across this in file manager after I had done a complete factory wipe, cache wipe, format, et al. In "USB Storage" was several files I had thought were on the 16Mb Class 6 microSDHC I had just formatted. So, where does this fit in the grand scheme?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Oo! Oo! I can actually answer this one. USB storage is the "internal" SD card. I know this because I added labels to them in Windows and tested this myself. So you have 2GB of internal storage (not an SD card) SD Card (the user-replaceable one) and then USB storage (the internal SD card.)
Yes, very confusing, and I'm glad I made this thread, because I found out I'm not an idiot. Okay, I still may be but not because I don't know the difference and/or usage. It seems there are at least a few others that got confused as well.
Entropy, so the naming convention is controlled by kernel and you can name that whatever you want? I'm for the switch, but maybe make two versions available? One with the old naming convention and one with the new. For the new, my suggestion would be to name all three something descriptive. IE:
internal storage = internal storage (it's 2GB, I don't think people confuse this much)
USB storage = permanent SD card or non-removable SD card
SD Card = external SD card or even removable SD card
I think that should be clear enough. One is internal storage... not an SD card. Out of the two SD cards, one is removable and the other is not. Simple enough.

resurrecting a dead thread
I'm curious why this has not been brought up...It appears with Custom ROMs we can have apps install direct from Play store to removable sd. We just need to properly partition the removable sd : http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1158993 .
I am actually looking into this practice. Does Shostock v4 not support such thing?
Also, folks who do partition their removable sd seem to favor amonRA over CWM...
Can someone shed some lights on this?

tora67 said:
I'm curious why this has not been brought up...It appears with Custom ROMs we can have apps install direct from Play store to removable sd. We just need to properly partition the removable sd : http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1158993 .
I am actually looking into this practice. Does Shostock v4 not support such thing?
Also, folks who do partition their removable sd seem to favor amonRA over CWM...
Can someone shed some lights on this?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
For starters that's a completely different device. Different manufacturer. HTC does things differently. They used to ship their phones with little storage like 4gb for OS and app install. They didn't provide gobs of onboard storage like Samsung.
Secondly that thread is over a year old.
AmonRA isn't available on this device. Again completely different devices, different methodologies.
The gs2 has plenty of storage and app install space available. Why does everyone think that installing your apps to external SD is a good thing?
Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 2

we want more space
I bet many like the OP would like apps and app data stored on their removable sd especially nowadays you can get a class 10 sd for cheap.

Have you noticed how many apps will not work at all with apps on the SD card?
If you have the apps installed on the sdcard and you plug into your computer the apps become unavailable and Widgets for those apps stop working.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

Pirateghost said:
. . . Widgets for those apps stop working.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
And I'm pretty sure you have to re-add them.

Native Android a2sd not working?

Hi, I'm currently running Firmware MediaPad ICS 4.0.3 HWMOD C232B005 which supposedly is pretty similar to stock. My problem is that the internal memory which apps are installed to, ae on the very same partition as the intenal sd card (mounted as /sdcard). Thus the andoird a2sd does not work, I get no "move to sd card option in Settings->Apps. With several games exceeding 500MB with the texture for the high resolution on the MediaPad, I need to be able to move some of them to SD. Also, I need the ames that store their data on /sdcard even if they shouldn't by Android standards (boo, Gameloft) to be stored on the REAL sdcard, whic is mounted as sdcard2. Preferably, I'd be able to do this without mucking about too much. Maybe the best option is to use CM10 if it's about ready for prime time? I guess it'll give me the choice of using /sdcard or /emmc as main storage. (Though it IS annoying CM by default incorrectly labels the sdcard as emmc and the internal memory as mmc - strictly opposite of defined standards for embedded devices.)

naguz said:
Hi, I'm currently running Firmware MediaPad ICS 4.0.3 HWMOD C232B005 which supposedly is pretty similar to stock. My problem is that the internal memory which apps are installed to, ae on the very same partition as the intenal sd card (mounted as /sdcard). Thus the andoird a2sd does not work, I get no "move to sd card option in Settings->Apps. With several games exceeding 500MB with the texture for the high resolution on the MediaPad, I need to be able to move some of them to SD. Also, I need the ames that store their data on /sdcard even if they shouldn't by Android standards (boo, Gameloft) to be stored on the REAL sdcard, whic is mounted as sdcard2. Preferably, I'd be able to do this without mucking about too much. Maybe the best option is to use CM10 if it's about ready for prime time? I guess it'll give me the choice of using /sdcard or /emmc as main storage. (Though it IS annoying CM by default incorrectly labels the sdcard as emmc and the internal memory as mmc - strictly opposite of defined standards for embedded devices.)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It's really easy, do this
settings > storage > set primary storage > SD card > restart tablet
all apps will be moved to external sd card, and hopefully also games data like gameloft files. if this didn't happen then do it manualy. if none of that worked well... just download the data again

I think even if you set primary storage to SD, your apps remain on internal. However it will force the Gameloft etc /sdcard storage to external.
I thought the old native apps to external SD functionality was deprecated from ICS onwards? But I could be wrong...
Sent from my HUAWEI MediaPad using Tapatalk 2

Setting the primary storage is the only option ICS provides, no other apps like app2sd work actualy, i tried them
but... root opens new doors remember, i'm sure there are some apps that can move all apps to external sd, although i son't think that's possible when it comes to system apps.
and here i have a question: is it possible to set en ext3 partition on the external sd so that apps can be moved there? i did this on my beloved "dead" htc wildfire and i tell you I LOVE IT! all apps on ext3 partition (256 mb) but when looking at storage settings they appear in internal memory!! crazy right? and that makes those apps load really fast whenturning the phone on.

Don't bother trying to use old a2sd hacks that were designed for Gingerbread and Froyo phones with only a few hundred MB of internal storage.
But I did verify, yes, if you select the option to designate primary (/sdcard) storage as the external SD, the option to move apps to SD reappears. I prefer to store as much as possible on internal rather than external, because the read/write speeds are faster. Of course, regardless of which you select, any app that does allow you to change its storage directory can have a path entered that locates the correct place.

Thanks for the replies everypne! My CM9 Galaxy S II does have an option for moving apps to sd card in the settings->apps menu for compatilbe apps, so I don't think this has been discontinued in ICS+?
Anyway, I figured there WAS enough space on the internal memory for the app I was installing when I got the insufficient space error. I also noticed I had different available memory on sdcard0 (internal storage) and /data (also the same partition of the internal storage) when I ran df in a terminal, and figured something was off, so I ditched the ROM I was using, wiped it all form recovery, and installed CM9. Seems to be working OK for now.
I'll still run out of space in the internal sd card - but for the huge data guzzlers like gameloft I'll try to use Directory Bind which I vaguely remembered reading about and so googled up. As mentioned, it is not really an option to have all apps default to save stuff on the external sd card for security reasons. But if directory bind works (or manually editing in bind mounts in init files), and hopefully it should still be smooth sailing.
Still not sure whether I want to trade it in for a 10" though. Such a pity I can't find any 10" without acceptable resolution, gps, 3g and a price I can justify. The Mediapad sure is a nifty device with a good screen, even though it is a little heavy. But no I'm going way of topic.

[Q] Are phones now required to mount their internal memory as emulated primary SD?

I first saw this whole "sdcard/sdcard0" and "extsdcard" mess with the Motorola RAZR, the first Smartphone I used which had a large amount of internal memory.
Personally, I found this maddeningly annoying, many apps were confused and assumed they were installing or writing to the SD card when they were just writing to internal. The whole point of a SD card (to me at least) is to have REMOVABLE memory.
I then found out when considering the Galaxy S3 and later S4 that they also did the same, I wondered why Samsung would do such an annoying thing.
Now, I finally upgraded my three-year-old EVO 3D running Gingerbread/ICS for a M8 running KitKat.... and was even assured it didn't perform such ridiculous stupidity as mounting the internal memory as a SD card (especially when I was told the EVO 4G LTE originally did this, but got an update that actually re-partitioned the flash memory to undo that). So when I installed a filemanager to remove some junk files from the SD card, I was pretty angry to see a "sdcard0" and "extsdcard" folder, though since there wasn't much I could do about that I just ignored it for the time and tried to delete the junk files from the SD card and move some to external...... when I got my next nasty surprise.
So then, is this whole primary/sdcard0 and secondary/extsdcard thing actually something that Google is pushing/forcing rather than stupidity of manufacturers? Are they required now to emulate the internal as a sdcard on KitKat devices so Google can indulge in their anti-sd card mentality and force people to use their cloud storage while turning Android into iPhone provide security and make Android less complicated because clearly Android is insecure and confusing to use and this isn't a coverup on their part? Or is there something in Android's design that prevents just having the 32 GIGS of internal memory (minus whatever is partitioned off to the system, boot, cache, etc) as one large chunk of internal and not emulate a SD card? Especially since their silly restrictions in KitKat only effect "secondary" memory and technically would not effect the SD card if there was no emulated one taking it's place as primary? (funny how this whole clutter and security issue isn't applying to internal memory, there it would be an even bigger problem...)
Or are manufacturers doing this anyway (the whole making the actual physical sdcard a secondary storage and tricking apps into thinking the internal memory is a sd card so they install and write to there when you tell them to use external memory) based on their own mentality? If this is a requirement from Google, then how did HTC get away with actually UN-DOING this exact thing on the 4G LTE?
Again, the whole point of having apps save their data and exported settings/whatever to the sdcard is so I am not dependant on the data being locked onto the internal memory and only accessible if the phone wants me to access it and is working. Even the downloads folder is on the internal, which some of my apps by default export saved settings to, and I cannot move it or even any of the files in it to the external sdcard because of the changes in KitKat, which is kinda the entire $#^^$^#^&#$^^$ point of exporting your saved settings.

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