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Hey,
I've noticed a very weird and particular problem with my Apps2SD on VillainROM 6.2. I've partitioned the SD card as recommended with no swap space and 512MB for ext2 partition and the rest left fat32 one. It is said that it should work automatically.
But after installing ~100 apps maybe less I'm left with 15MB of internal storage left and an information that I cannot install nothing no more due to low space.
I've run appscheck or whatever that script's called (you know the one) and it says: "apps2sd is working without dalvik-cache"
Clearly it should be working then but it's not. I understand that the space should be going down a bit one way or another but having installed less than a 100 apps I should not run out of it especially that most of them were quite small. That said I just wanna add that Android Commander shows up ext2 partition greyed out when I access my mobile with it - so, it sort of prooves that there's something wrong.
Is there a way to fix it, so I could fully enjoy my phone?
Hey guys ive been lurking around for a while troubleshooting my builds, I have figured out that when I run my android build off of the sd card by itself everything runs well, but once i put in my 10GB of music everything starts to fall appart and i get sod after a minute or two in the lockscreen. I was wondering if creating a separate ext2 partition for android to boot from and keeping my data on the other partition would provide me with any more stability. BTW im using the stock 16 gig class 2 card that came with the phone
Where on the SD card is your music? Root or in the Android folder. I ask because I have a 2 year old 8GB class 4 SD card that came with my preloaded CGO8 navigation (ICO8, but for US) and have never formatted. I've loaded most of the Android builds and most I've had no problems, other than typical for the build.
SD cards are digital. Unlike analog hard disks data is not fragmented. Formatting does not serve a useful purpose for an SD card. Even deleting files (except protected) deleting is just as, if not more, effective.
Do some research, think independently to come up with your own conclusions, but these are mine.
Oh, by the way, this is not the right forum for your question....you should have done some research before posting.
i was not asking about formating i was asking about partitioning and if running android from an ext2 partition on the sd card would create more stability on the build
audscott said:
SD cards are digital. Unlike analog hard disks data is not fragmented.
Do some research, think independently to come up with your own conclusions, but these are mine.
Oh, by the way, this is not the right forum for your question....you should have done some research before posting.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Analog hard disks? No fragmentation on flash media? Wow, sounds like you need to do some research...
I also have the same issue where if I put Android along with my music on the 16gb card, it gets stuck at jumping to kernal on reboot.
im copying my music on the new sd now will report back if the problem persists, but i have a feeling that running off of an ext2 partition will provide us with better r/w speeds, similar to ubuntu running on an ntfs partition instead of ext4
Having music (anything else) on your SD card should not really affect Android. Most builds are in an 'Android' folder, so that is where the system looks for its information. This may slow things down a bit (just like an overloaded HDD) but generally there should not be much difference.
Creating and ext2 partition will not help. Of course, now that I have said that, I have an ext2 partition on my SD card that was left from using my rooted G1 with cyanogen mod and Apps2SD. By default, my android build on my HD2 automatically looked in that partition for apps (froyo does this).
So, I do not think it will change anything about freezing or 'jumping to kernal' but it does have its uses.
EDIT: And, since WinMo is actually booting android, I don't think containing your android stuff in an .ext2 partition would even work. Needs to be FAT32 for haret to see it. (this is my assumption, not necessarily a fact)
Isn't the rootfs.img file actually like a simulated ext2 filesystem? Doesn't this file emulate the device memory? I'm not exactly sure, maybe someone else can expand on this. I don't think there is any benefit to partitioning the card in the current state of the hd2's development. Maybe when we are able to flash nand, nand will be formatted to ext2.
polo735 said:
Isn't the rootfs.img file actually like a simulated ext2 filesystem? Doesn't this file emulate the device memory? I'm not exactly sure, maybe someone else can expand on this. I don't think there is any benefit to partitioning the card in the current state of the hd2's development. Maybe when we are able to flash nand, nand will be formatted to ext2.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, there is that and the system.ext2 and data.img. This is all the files in Android (basically).
But with these files, android knows where to look to find them, placing them in your own ext2 partition will hide them from android.
When we are able to flash to nand (and now) an ext2 partition will allow you to store apps on that partition, given you are able to move apps to SD, which is not currently possible in our builds.
I installed apps to my SD card on my G1 (on an ext2 partition), so when I used Froyo on my HD2, android was able to read from that partition and use my old apps. All that means is that I did not have to reinstall all my old apps, and save space in the data.img created by android.
audscott said:
Where on the SD card is your music? Root or in the Android folder. I ask because I have a 2 year old 8GB class 4 SD card that came with my preloaded CGO8 navigation (ICO8, but for US) and have never formatted. I've loaded most of the Android builds and most I've had no problems, other than typical for the build.
SD cards are digital. Unlike analog hard disks data is not fragmented. Formatting does not serve a useful purpose for an SD card. Even deleting files (except protected) deleting is just as, if not more, effective.
Do some research, think independently to come up with your own conclusions, but these are mine.
Oh, by the way, this is not the right forum for your question....you should have done some research before posting.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
First of all, before you call someone out you might want to do some research of your own so you don't come across looking like a moron. Fragmentation happens regardless of the actual hardware, and most file systems are vulnerable (whether it be fat, ntfs, ext2, ext4, etc). And while deleting files and reformatting end in the same result, a quick reformat makes far fewer writes to the card by simply wiping the allocation table. Each file name must be modified individually if you delete them, adding unnecessary wear to the card. As for a hard drive being "analog", it stores its data the same way as a memory card - 0's and 1's - which is digital. Just a little refresher there.
Now, as for the question at hand, which is completely appropriate for this forum as it directly concerns the development and installation of android on our HD2's, the use of ext2 for the android files has been done successfully on other winmo devices in order to increase stability and speed in the system. In fact I have done this very thing on my Kaiser in the past. Whether its possible with our current HD2 setup is another matter, so I'll direct you to these links - do a little reading and play around with it, let us know what you find. I'll probably look at it myself this weekend as a stop-gap until a full NAND flash becomes available, which hopefully is sooner rather than later - I'll report back if I find something.
http://www.androidonhtc.com/wiki/Installing_Android
http://android-devs.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=194&sid=69cc2d8c93262ff8c70de594d50e5874
In my own experience, I have a 4Gig class 10 and 16Gig class 2 (stock).
I use my 4Gig for Android test runs.
I use my 16Gig for my Android currently in use.
I have my Music in at the root /Music
Android is in the traditional /Android
Any pics I take I just move over /DCIM
I haven't experience any corruption. Before testing, I format the SD card on my computer with 64k or 32K blocks. I copy over my saved /Music and /DCIM and then load the new Android in /Android.
ALWAYS Eject the SD card. Keeping those rules and I haven't had issues.
Well I switched to my other 16gig class 2 and my problems went away, it seems the stock card was going bad but not using a 20yr old file system would be nice regardless
Sent from my HTC HD2 using XDA App
... oh, and about fragmentation, I'm not a software engineer (I'm electronics engineer), but I wouldn't get too worried about SD card fragmentation. It can happen, but not in the same way as a physical HD.
SD cards can do random access reads/writes much better than a physical hard drive. However, if you've formatted your blocks too small, the controller has to piece together two bits of info instead of one.
Example: 64k file written to 8k formatted SD, will have to piece together 8 blocks.
A 64k file written to 64k formatted SD is written all to one block.
The flip-side is if you have a bunch of small files (1k - 5k) and you're formatted at 64k, you've just wasted 63k of a 64k block writing a 1k file. It's inefficient.
willgill said:
Example: 64k file written to 8k formatted SD, will have to piece together 8 blocks.
A 64k file written to 64k formatted SD is written all to one block.
The flip-side is if you have a bunch of small files (1k - 5k) and you're formatted at 64k, you've just wasted 63k of a 64k block writing a 1k file. It's inefficient.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Considering the sizes of most music and picture files these days and the fact that all Android little files are inside one large file, I believe going with 64k blocks would be better. Even going with a larger block size than 64k might be a good idea. Too bad 64k is the limit.
Larger block sizes might be inefficient when dealing with system folders like C drive in windows or system folder in linux since they contain a huge number of small files. That is why windows default is 4k.
I'm opening a new thread as this is really the work of verygreen, racks11479, j4mm3r, stilger, and rookie1.... and I've hijacked their threads enough as I only did minor repackaging to put this together as a hopefully generic template image...
This is but an attempt to create a mostly generic SDcard template for installing all versions, as base for Froyo, CM7, or Honeycomb as an SDcard install...... Most of the features best lend themselves to CM7 as verygreen's Alternate (uAltImg/Ram) allows installing and upgrading all current variants of CM7... but with Recovery as CWR 3.0.1.0/Ext3/4 with verygreen's installer/upgrader as uAltImg/Ram it can handle all your CM7 variant install and upgrade/migrate to SDcard needs...
The generic 2GB expandable image is available from;
http://dev-host.org/aewwoavj437z/Nook-2GB-SDCard-CW3010-VGCM7InstallerAsALTinMultiBoot-v6.zip
I suspect/hope that this thread will fade fast from the first page but just hope it will be useful for folks when modeling and building generic SDcard bootable versions...
EDIT: For folks who just want to update just their existing SDcard boot partition and get this boot functionality
I removed the files you shouldn't change from an existing /boot dir and zipped up the rest and posted this zip in my dropbox
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6922721/jtbnet-modified-bootfiles.zip
Just have your SDcard mounted as /boot on your PC and extract this zip to it to get the same boot options as my card...
The layout of the current .v6 template SDcard to allow it to fit on a 2GB minimum size card is;
Part. # Name FStype Alloc. size Free Space
1 /boot FAT32 149MB 120MB
2 /system EXT3 462MB 455MB
3 /data EXT3 964MB 948MB
4 /sdcard FAT32 39MB 38MB
This is a Generic 2GB expandable template SDcard image to use to create pretty much whatever bootable SDcard you want...
How it differs with earlier Generic SDcards is I reorganized the default, Recovery, and Alternate boot choices using j3mm4r's multi-boot bootloader.
I updated Recovery to the newest version CWR 3.0.1.0 modified to write to SDcard instead of Internal/eMMC memory partitions with the help of user stilger. This can be used for Backup and Restore of full cards... as well as installing of CW packages like Google Apps, and Custom CW Rom Install packages you can find for Froyo, Honeycomb Preview and Gingerbread in this forum...
I moved verygreen's CM7 Installer/updater to the Alternate boot choice... In verygreen's thread he uses this as the default Kernal and Ramdisk which gets overwritten by the package you install... thus the need for 2 cards or copying files around to reuse the original... with this as Alternate it doesn't get overwritten and thus is available next time you want to use it... like Install CM7 for the first time... then upgrade to the new Nitely the next day without need for finding and copying files or using 2 cards...
How verygreen's Installer/updater differs from CWR... With vg's installer you place the installable files on the /boot partition... this installer will install SDcard ready or agnostic installables AND will install eMMC designed version CM7 builds and do on the fly conversion to SDcard version during the install seemlessly...
CWR 3.0.1.0 for SDcard will expect the install zip or backup file to be on the 4th/sdcard partition and expects these to be agnostic installs as it doesn't do anything on the fly to make these run on SDcard... It they are built or modifed to run on SDcard thats fine and installing from this Recovery works as would be expected...
I extended the size of the boot partition to have ~120MB free to allow for installing larger images as the prior ~100MB space was too close to currently typical installable Custom Rom packages.
The 4th /sdcard partiiton is created Very small to fit on a 2GB SDcard and really needs to be expanded using Easeus Partition Manager on Windows or an equivalent program on your OS of choice to fit your size choice of SDcard...
I will offer some experience with SDcard here... I bought 10 different manufacturers, and Class/speed cards... I ran disk benchmarks for all and then used the ones that performed best for daily use... Sandisk brand is the most generally faster than the Class it's stamped... A Class 4 beats most brand's Class-6... I wanted the fastest... and settled on buying 8 cards as KingMax Class-10 SDcards, 4 4GB and 4 8GB, from buy.com... these aren't the cheapest cards by far, BUT in this case you DO get what you pay for...
So for daily use I'd reccommend the KingMax 8GB Class-10 cards as I've gotten better than 2000 Quadrant scores running these cards for Froyo, Honeycomb, and CM7 Gingerbread installs... this is as good or better performance than most scores I've seen from folks running the same installs on Internal/eMMC...
CM7 Install Example by User stilger
with comments added by jtbnet and xdabr:
----------------------------------
You *should* be able to do the following with the image provided in this thread on your 2gb card:
1. Download image from this thread (currently v6)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6922721/Nook-2GB-SDCard-CW3010-VGCM7InstallerAsALTinMultiBoot-v6.zip
2. Write this Image to your card (I use win32diskimager or dd in linux)
3. Use Easeus Partition Manager to extend the 30MB 4th FAT32 /sdcard partition to fit your current SDcard
4. Once the card is written, place the cm7 zip in the root of the boot filesystem.
(Should be a drive letter with boot in the name with files like uImage uRecImg etc on it)
http://mirror.teamdouche.net/?device=encore
5. Place the gapps zip of your choice in the same "boot" filesystem.
http://android.d3xt3r01.tk/cyanogen/gapps/gapps-gb-20110307-signed.zip
6. Place SDcard in your Nook.
7. Turn on Nook.
8. Hit N button when it says Press any key for menu.
9. Choose SD and Alternate as your boot option
10. Let it finish. It says it will reboot but usually hangs for me so I give it 10 seconds after the screen goes black and long press the power button until it starts up...
11. Boot into CM7
TIP: To have rooted stock eclair version nook use the same sdcard partition (#4) as you use when booting on an SDcard bootable you can make one simple edit to the stock eclair /system/etc/vold.conf...
There are 2 definition blocks in the file... the first is for mount of internal eMMC partition 8 as /media, while the second block is to mount the 1st sdcard partition as /sdcard... to change this so that the 4th partition on the SDcard gets mount to /sdcard just Add a line;
partition 4
in the second block with your favorite editor like Root Explorer, or via adb pull,edit,push of the vold.conf file... and reboot...
I.E.:
## vold configuration file for zoom2
# modified for encore
volume_sdcard {
## This is the direct uevent device path to the SD slot on the device
media_path /devices/platform/mmci-omap-hs.1/mmc_host/mmc0
partition 8
media_type mmc
##mount_point /sdcard
mount_point /media
ums_path /devices/platform/usb_mass_storage/lun0
}
volume_sdcard2 {
## Currently points to internal eMMC, assumes eMMC is formatted as FAT32
media_path /devices/platform/mmci-omap-hs.0/mmc_host/mmc1
partition 4
media_type mmc
##mount_point /media
mount_point /sdcard
ums_path /devices/platform/usb_mass_storage/lun1
}
Just to verify, this image has?
J4mm3r's multi-boot
CWM 3.0.1.0 but with correct mounts like racks11479's CWM 3.0.0.6 as uRecImg/Ram
verygreens installer as uAltImg/Ram
I had already done the same with racks CWM, but that's ext4 only I believe.
This will be great with CWM 3.0.1.0.
Thanks for putting this together
P.S. What is the CM7 vesion as uImage/uRamdisk?
Tried to burn the image on a 2Gb SDcard to look inside.
It's a 4GB image not 2GB.
bobshute said:
Tried to burn the image on a 2Gb SDcard to look inside.
It's a 4GB image not 2GB.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sorry Bob... I uploaded the wrong image... Had a long day at work today so just getting to uploading a fresh image... this one IS 2 GB with larger/150MB /boot but a very small 4th /sdcard partition, and has formated system and data so won't boot to CM7 anymore but it's much cleaner...
Only thing this 2GB image only zips down to 800MB... strange as the wrong card I uploaded last night was a 4GB card I was testing with and with lots of data on system and data and it zipped down to 300MB... but this one is cleaner and does boot to CWR 3.0.1.0 as recovery and verygreen's CM7 install/updater as Alternate boot...
It's taking forever to upload so I may not be able to update the link in the original post till the morning as already well after midnight now...
bobshute said:
Just to verify, this image has?
J4mm3r's multi-boot
CWM 3.0.1.0 but with correct mounts like racks11479's CWM 3.0.0.6 as uRecImg/Ram
verygreens installer as uAltImg/Ram
I had already done the same with racks CWM, but that's ext4 only I believe.
This will be great with CWM 3.0.1.0.
Thanks for putting this together
P.S. What is the CM7 vesion as uImage/uRamdisk?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You are correct on what it has for uRecImg/Ram and uAltImg/Ram and yes Racks' 3.0.0.6 is Ext4 Only.... thus why I wanted to update to 3.0.1.0/Ext3 and Ext4...
That wrong 4GB upload from yestrday was the test card I had expanded and tested installing CM7 RC4 with UI tweaks to test VG's installer and then restored system and data from my normal card's backup to test CWR 3.0.1.0... so I mixed up the cards when I made the image and uploaded the expanded test 4GB version instead of the original blank 2GB version I started with...
Updated OP with cleaned up file...
Thanx to Verygreen's suggestion to zerofill the system and data partitions to allow for better compression I uploaded v4 where the zipped filesize is down to 420MB from prior zip of 770MB. OP link is updated...
I'm going to continue to see if I can find a way to make this significantly smaller while still containg all 4 mountable partitions and will upload any success story if/when it might occur...
I actually used the 2GB image itself booted to CWR and ran 'adb shell' to allow me to use the 'dd' command to zero fill the system and data partitions... THANX again to verygreen for that idea...
jtbnet said:
Thanx to Verygreen's suggestion to zerofill the system and data partitions to allow for better compression I uploaded v4 where the zipped filesize is down to 420MB from prior zip of 770MB. OP link is updated...
I'm going to continue to see if I can find a way to make this significantly smaller while still containg all 4 mountable partitions and will upload any success story if/when it might occur...
I actually used the 2GB image itself booted to CWR and ran 'adb shell' to allow me to use the 'dd' command to zero fill the system and data partitions... THANX again to verygreen for that idea...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
jtbnet - I think zeroing the /data and /system file systems causes your script to fail. I put this image on an 8gb sd card today. I copied the latest Tablet Tweaks and gapps zip files to the boot partition rebooted into altboot.. It failed not being able to create files. Took the nook into recovery logged in via ADB and /system where full:
Before:
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
tmpfs 250080 32 250048 0% /dev
/dev/block/mmcblk0p7 350021 52983 278967 16% /cache
/dev/block/mmcblk1p2 458925 458925 0 100% /system
/dev/block/mmcblk1p3 972436 972436 0 100% /data
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Used recovery to format /data and /system.
After:
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
tmpfs 250080 32 250048 0% /dev
/dev/block/mmcblk0p7 350021 52983 278967 16% /cache
/dev/block/mmcblk1p2 458925 8238 426992 2% /system
/dev/block/mmcblk1p3 972436 16424 906616 2% /data
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Booted into alt boot after copying zip files to /boot again and everything installed fine.
stilger said:
jtbnet - I think zeroing the /data and /system file systems causes your script to fail. I put this image on an 8gb sd card today. I copied the latest Tablet Tweaks and gapps zip files to the boot partition rebooted into altboot.. It failed not being able to create files. Took the nook into recovery logged in via ADB and /system where full:
...
Used recovery to format /data and /system.
.
Booted into alt boot after copying zip files to /boot again and everything installed fine.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
THANX
I had been just deleting the filler files in CWR (/system/zerofile and /data/zerofile) instead of formatting... BUT I think I have found the answer... I need to zerofill to cause the 2 partitions to compress reasonably... BUT if I create the files then sync,umount,re-mount then delete the files, sync, umount this frees space by freeing the inode but shouldn't actually touch the zerofill'd now freed space... so compression should be the same without the files...
I'll give this a try and upload v5 later hopefully...
EDIT: finally found time to upload v5... well mirror is still in process... /data and /system now empty and result is even a few bytes smaller...
Thank you jtbnet, but I am so confused.
Personally I'm mostly interested in SD card booting because I'd still like to leave the internal eMMC memory stock or near-stock.
But I get confused as to how the "size agnostic" approach ultimately writes to the card, whether it uses the NC or a PC as an intermediary to get the card written, how Clockwork Recovery comes into play if at all (I thought it was only used when you ARE futzing with the eMMC instead of cleanly booting off SD card), and more.
I would prefer a list of disk images I can write to an SD card with standard tools (I used "dd" on a Mac for brian's Nookie Froyo SD image), but it seems your mod here and the main size-agnostic installer are more complicated than that.
Is there a simple explanation you can give me (and other similar newbies)?
xdabr said:
Thank you jtbnet, but I am so confused.
Personally I'm mostly interested in SD card booting because I'd still like to leave the internal eMMC memory stock or near-stock.
But I get confused as to how the "size agnostic" approach ultimately writes to the card, whether it uses the NC or a PC as an intermediary to get the card written, how Clockwork Recovery comes into play if at all (I thought it was only used when you ARE futzing with the eMMC instead of cleanly booting off SD card), and more.
I would prefer a list of disk images I can write to an SD card with standard tools (I used "dd" on a Mac for brian's Nookie Froyo SD image), but it seems your mod here and the main size-agnostic installer are more complicated than that.
Is there a simple explanation you can give me (and other similar newbies)?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Check racks11479's thread for a good number of SDcard installable versions...
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=998861
I do hope to find time to update the second post in this thread with some much better explanantion... but in short...
This is a Generic 2GB expandable template SDcard image to use to create pretty much whatever bootable SDcard you want...
How it differs with earlier Generic SDcards is I reorganized the default, Recovery, and Alternate boot choices using j3mm4r's multi-boot bootloader.
I updated Recovery to the newest version CWR 3.0.1.0 modified to write to SDcard instead of Internal/eMMC memory partitions with the help of user stilger. This can be used for Backup and Restore of full cards... as well as installing of CW packages like Google Apps, and Custom CW Rom Install packages you can find for Froyo, Honeycomb Preview and Gingerbread in this forum...
I moved verygreen's CM7 Installer/updater to the Alternate boot choice... In verygreen's thread he uses this as the default Kernal and Ramdisk which gets overwritten by the package you install... thus the need for 2 cards or copying files around to reuse the original... with this as Alternate it doesn't get overwritten and thus is available next time you want to use it... like Install CM7 for the first time... then upgrade to the new Nitely the next day without need for finding and copying files or using 2 cards...
How verygreen's Installer/updater differs from CWR... With vg's installer you place the installable files on the /boot partition... this installer will install SDcard ready or agnostic installables AND will install eMMC designed version CM7 builds and do on the fly conversion to SDcard version during the install seemlessly...
CWR 3.0.1.0 for SDcard will expect the install zip or backup file to be on the 4th/sdcard partition and expects these to be agnostic installs as it doesn't do anything on the fly to make these run on SDcard... It they are built or modifed to run on SDcard thats fine and installing from this Recovery works as would be expected...
I extended the size of the boot partition to have ~120MB free to allow for installing larger images as the prior ~100MB space was too close to currently typical installable Custom Rom packages.
The 4th /sdcard partiiton is created Very small to fit on a 2GB SDcard and really needs to be expanded using Easeus Partition Manager on Windows or an equivalent program on your OS of choice to fit your size choice of SDcard...
I will offer some experience with SDcard here... I bought 10 different manufacturers, and Class/speed cards... I ran disk benchmarks for all and then used the ones that performed best for daily use... Sandisk brand is the most generally faster than the Class it's stamped... A Class 4 beats most brand's Class-6... I wanted the fastest... and settled on buying 8 cards as KingMax Class-10 SDcards, 4 4GB and 4 8GB, from buy.com... these aren't the cheapest cards by far, BUT in this case you DO get what you pay for...
So for daily use I'd reccommend the KingMax 8GB Class-10 cards as I've gotten better than 2000 Quadrant scores running these cards for Froyo, Honeycomb, and CM7 Gingerbread installs... this is as good or better performance than most scores I've seen from folks running the same installs on Internal/eMMC...
Even 400M seems excessive for mostly zero filled card.
Basically your target compressed size should be the size of all real files on the card + a little bit.
Make sure you zero the extra fat partition and boot partition free space too as plenty of random data might be there.
verygreen said:
Even 400M seems excessive for mostly zero filled card.
Basically your target compressed size should be the size of all real files on the card + a little bit.
Make sure you zero the extra fat partition and boot partition free space too as plenty of random data might be there.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
THANX...
I did think of that... after the fact... but the free space on those 2 partitions is <150MB which at the expected 4 to 1 compression I'm seeing would only save another ~35MB... so I didn't bother try and re-upload.... as less than 10% expected improvement... IF I need to upload another version I will include this in that version though...
I'd tend to agree with you on "your target compressed size should be the size of all real files on the card + a little bit." but the actual Used space is ~100MB, Total Space = 2GB, Unused space is thus around 1.9GB... so compression (1/5-1/4) really STINKS on this... but I'm not sure why as I've tried winzip and gzip with multiple levels of compression...
Thank you so much for the explanation, jtbnet, but it's hurting my noob brain!
It seems that most people like CM7 with Tablet Tweaks by mad-murdock. Could someone detail for me (step by step) the simplest way to get that in a bootable 2 GB SD card, preferably without involving a second card, and without touching the eMMC at all? I can't tell whether this project does that or not (and if so, how) or whether I should stick with racks11479's approach, or what. My apologies; I'm not usually this far behind.
Edit: I forgot that mad-murdock's Tablet Tweaks were already merged. So I guess just make that "CM7".
xdabr said:
Thank you so much for the explanation, jtbnet, but it's hurting my noob brain!
It seems that most people like CM7 with Tablet Tweaks by mad-murdock. Could someone detail for me (step by step) the simplest way to get that in a bootable 2 GB SD card, preferably without involving a second card, and without touching the eMMC at all? I can't tell whether this project does that or not (and if so, how) or whether I should stick with racks11479's approach, or what. My apologies; I'm not usually this far behind.
Edit: I forgot that mad-murdock's Tablet Tweaks were already merged. So I guess just make that "CM7".
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You *should* be able to do the following with the image provided in this thread on your 2gb card:
1. Download image from this thread (currently v5)
2. Write this Image to your card (I use win32diskimager or dd in linux)
3. Once the card is written place the cm7 zip in the root of the boot filesystem. (Should be a drive letter with boot in the name with files like uImage uRecImg etc on it)
4. Place the gapps zip of your choice in the same "boot" filesystem.
5. Place sdcard in nook.
6. Turn on nook.
7. Hit N button when it says Press any key for menu.
8. Choose SD and Alternate as your boot option
9. Let it finish.
10. Boot into CM7
I did not provide you all the links but the CM7 nook image in mad murdocks Tablet Tweaks thread or the latest nightly for the nook (next nightly build should have Tablet Tweaks) should work. The gapps zip is also available at the CM site.
FYI - This image is based off the work of verygreen's thread: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1000957
Hopefully this will get you going.
Perfect recipe; thank you, stilger! Just what I (and likely lots of others) needed to know. I'll probably try this tonight.
I love this place.
stilger said:
You *should* be able to do the following with the image provided in this thread on your 2gb card:
1. Download image from this thread (currently v5)
2. Write this Image to your card (I use win32diskimager or dd in linux)
3. Once the card is written place the cm7 zip in the root of the boot filesystem. (Should be a drive letter with boot in the name with files like uImage uRecImg etc on it)
4. Place the gapps zip of your choice in the same "boot" filesystem.
5. Place sdcard in nook.
6. Turn on nook.
7. Hit N button when it says Press any key for menu.
8. Choose SD and Alternate as your boot option
9. Let it finish.
10. Boot into CM7
I did not provide you all the links but the CM7 nook image in mad murdocks Tablet Tweaks thread or the latest nightly for the nook (next nightly build should have Tablet Tweaks) should work. The gapps zip is also available at the CM site.
FYI - This image is based off the work of verygreen's thread: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1000957
Hopefully this will get you going.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
THANX...
I'd add one step which is to use something like Easeus Partition Manager to extend the /sdcard partition to fill your larger than 2GB card between #2 and #3... as if only using the 2GB card image /sdcard is Only ~30MB big ... mostly just a Fat32 FS placeholder to allow extending...
jtbnet said:
THANX...
I'd add one step which is to use something like Easeus Partition Manager to extend the /sdcard partition to fill your larger than 2GB card between #2 and #3... as if only using the 2GB card image /sdcard is Only ~30MB big ... mostly just a Fat32 FS placeholder to allow extending...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You should take and add this step by step process to the first or second post.
Maybe even add links etc... Dunno. Up to you.
stilger said:
You should take and add this step by step process to the first or second post.
Maybe even add links etc... Dunno. Up to you.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
THANX... Added your steps as an example in the Second post...
Hi, in the Nook Development forums, I found this post from Albert Wentz: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1439630
But unless I'm confused, I believe there are many other posts with other roll-your-own instructions? Such as: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1466583
All I want to do is build the SD card for my kid's nooks (versus paying $20 to N2A) so I can boot to it to run Android just like the N2A card. Does anyone know which post N2A may have followed to build their version? Or is Al's post the most modern build? Or the 2nd URL I list?
I'm quite technical so know I can do this, I just need to know which is the latest and greatest, or if there are many diff build customizations, which, let's say, is the most popular ? I mainly care that it has Google Play and Amazon App stores, and that I can sideload ebooks, mp3's,videos. If it comes with other apps, fine, but I'm fine with downloading,installing any I wish afterwards.
And.....some posts mention you don't have to modify your nook at all, just boot to the SD card, but others say it modifies the Nook (roots it), so that if you ever had to return it you'd have to restore it (hence best to back it up beforehand). Which is correct???
Al's method works fine. Anything you mentioned that you wish to try will work. I ran boot to SD android rom for several months before I took the plunge and rooted my 8gb Nook to a full android tablet.
It in no way modifies the internal workings of your Nook. The Nook allows booting to the card by design. Just use a Sandisk card of 8gb or more for best results and all you need is a class 4 speed rating. Believe it or not, a class 10 doesn't work as well.
YMMV
Good luck and have fun with it!
jaxn51 said:
Al's method works fine. Anything you mentioned that you wish to try will work. I ran boot to SD android rom for several months before I took the plunge and rooted my 8gb Nook to a full android tablet.
It in no way modifies the internal workings of your Nook. The Nook allows booting to the card by design. Just use a Sandisk card of 8gb or more for best results and all you need is a class 4 speed rating. Believe it or not, a class 10 doesn't work as well.
YMMV
Good luck and have fun with it!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
OK thanks, so if I understand you, rooting is a separate method, as in my 2nd URL referenced. (and in reading that, the SD card is only used to flash (or pull) the image from, to put onto your Nook.) I don't know about backup, but I don't think I want to mess with the stock OS for now. Maybe if B&N abandons it. I guess I don't see it as a big deal that my kids will need to reboot each time to toggle between nook OS and Android.
I read that about the Class4 vs 10. I think I even read posts about class 10's not only running slow, but acting really buggy? Is that right?... One of our SD cards is a 16GB class 4 and a 8GB class 6. Anyone heard if class 6's have any issues?
Extremely easy process to build a card similar to N2A to run a very stable CM10 from:
http://iamafanof.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/cm10-0-jellybean-sdcard-img-for-nook-tablet/
dtetner water
asawi said:
Extremely easy process to build a card similar to N2A to run a very stable CM10 from:
iamafanof.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/cm10-0-jellybean-sdcard-img-for-nook-tablet/
Ooops!
I just realized both URLs I posted (even 1st one from Albert) mention rooting.(altering tablet) My mistake. Ok, so where's the mainstream single post on XDA forums that describes the most popular non-root (boot to SD) process? I'd rather follow a post off XDA website. And if I have issues, maybe fallback to that URL you gave me, although his English is not so great, so afraid I might get lost in his partitioning instructions. I also don't have a Linux box at home (re: his mention of EXT4) although I have been trained on/worked with Linux some. Although running Jellybean since it's the latest & greatest sounds nice....although I've read enough articles from mainstream tech sites that state it's a bit too buggy? I'm sure ICS is plenty good enough and all apps support it.
Whats the difference between CWM (clockwork mod) and CM (cyanogen)? Wikipedia just says "The CyanogenMod source code repository also contains the ClockworkMod Recovery"
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The step by step you'll find somewhere here on XDA actually is the work of the guy I posted to. So my link is the source. That "Iamafanof" blogger is the person "Succulent" you'll see referred to here at XDA. Entirely up to you of course, but I don't see why you wouldn't at least check it out.
Edit:
You do not need a Linux system and I don't know what gave you the idea you would. The process is extremely simple: Download a rather large file, burn it to an sd-card, expand one partition (optional but recommended).
asawi said:
The step by step you'll find somewhere here on XDA actually is the work of the guy I posted to. So my link is the source. That "Iamafanof" blogger is the person "Succulent" you'll see referred to here at XDA. Entirely up to you of course, but I don't see why you wouldn't at least check it out.
Edit:
You do not need a Linux system and I don't know what gave you the idea you would. The process is extremely simple: Download a rather large file, burn it to an sd-card, expand one partition (optional but recommended).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I thought that because as far as I'm aware, the EXT4 that he mentions (for P3 Data1) is a linux type partition. (unless some Windows partitioning tool can create it I'm not aware of) I'm willing to try his steps. So I guess you'd recreate the "P3 FAT32 SDCARD" partition the same size as it was before then? And the P4 (EXT4) you'd resize, as you mention, to take advantage of all the rest of the space on your 8 or 16GB card. But what free tool under Windows can create EXT4 ?
baytee said:
And the P4 (EXT4) you'd resize, as you mention, to take advantage of all the rest of the space on your 8 or 16GB card. But what free tool under Windows can create EXT4 ?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You do not have to create any EXT4 partition. Nor any other other kind of partition. All you have to do is expand the FAT32 partition. MiniTool is free and will do that for you.
http://download.cnet.com/MiniTool-Partition-Wizard-Home-Edition/3000-2094_4-10962200.html
Edit: And, FWIW, I went and checked. Mini Tool can also create EXT4 partitions, should you want to.
I got that image onto the SDcard, it now has 4 partitions:
BOOT 249MB (FAT32)
350MB (EXT3) 91% used
600MB (EXT3) 3% used
SDCARD 713MB (FAT32)
13GB Unallocated
So I would right click partition "SDCARD", extend it to the 13GB.
But, in his post he mentions one partition (P3,DATA1, which MiniTool doesn't show any partition labeled as such, but I assume he's just talking about the 3rd partition (the 600MB Ext3 partition) being used to store just apps & app data. (I assume since it's EXT3 which is compat w/linux i.e. Android) If so, what do you think..is 600MB enough for downloading/installing lots of apps? Or is it wiser to extend it to maybe 2 or 4 or even GB? For example I have the Humble Bundle games for Android Tablet. The installs (APK) are huge...anywhere from 30-200MB themselves..... I assume their post-install size takes up a different amount of space (more) than the APK itself, just as with Windows EXE installers? And if I recall correctly I believe once installed, you can del the APK... Anyhow, I'm emailing the company to see what install reqs for disk space are, since all they list the APK size.
Only you know how large data partition you need but it sure looks like you need it larger than 600.
So, to add some sort of instructions:
Delete partitions 3 and 4 (the 600 and 713 MB ones)
Apply changes (top left)
Create a new partition 3. Make it EXT4, Primary and the size you want
Apply changes
Create a new partition 4, FAT32, primary to pick up whatever is left unallocated
Apply changes
Don't forget to "apply changes"
baytee said:
...
But, in his post he mentions one partition (P3,DATA1, which MiniTool doesn't show any partition labeled as such, but I assume he's just talking about the 3rd partition (the 600MB Ext3 partition) being used to store just apps & app data. (I assume since it's EXT3 which is compat w/linux i.e. Android) If so, what do you think..is 600MB enough for downloading/installing lots of apps? Or is it wiser to extend it to maybe 2 or 4 or even GB? For example I have the Humble Bundle games for Android Tablet. The installs (APK) are huge...anywhere from 30-200MB themselves..... I assume their post-install size takes up a different amount of space (more) than the APK itself, just as with Windows EXE installers? And if I recall correctly I believe once installed, you can del the APK... Anyhow, I'm emailing the company to see what install reqs for disk space are, since all they list the APK size.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Although all apps downloaded from Google Play will reside on /data partition, many apps keep their data separately in the internal user-media partition or on the external SDcard (the 4th /sdcard partition in your case). For example, I have a video game app which takes ~30MB for itself in /data but ~350MB for data storage on the SDcard. The Titanium Backup app works the same way. So you'll have to anticipate not just the app's storage size requirement but also its targeted partition for data storage.
Does this also work for CM 12?
Can these instructions be used with CM12 Lolipop?
panamamike said:
Can these instructions be used with CM12 Lolipop?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, if you can find a CM12 ROM image that was specifically compiled to run on SD.
Sent from my BN NookHD+ using XDA Premium HD app
digixmax said:
Yes, if you can find a CM12 ROM image that was specifically compiled to run on SD.
Sent from my BN NookHD+ using XDA Premium HD app
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Where can I find that ROM image? I haven't had much luck finding such a ROM, I haven't seen that specified.
panamamike said:
Where can I find that ROM image? I haven't had much luck finding such a ROM, I haven't seen that specified.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I am not aware of any CM12 SD-based ROM build for the Nook Tablet, but you can find CM11 SD-based builds for the NT at https://iamafanof.wordpress.com/category/nook-tablet-2/.
I've been running latest SmoothBean for some time and it appears to be the most stable JB version out there. Always open to other opinions. I'm an old IT guy with years of Windows/Unix/Linux experience and I've had Mepis Linux on my desktop in the past, for 2-3 years, but went back to Windows 7/8. Anyway I noticed the install instructions say format the internal SD storage 4096/0 but it seems to run fine with 2048/0 so just wondering what the reasoning is for the increased partition size when it seems to run fine with 2048?
Also why 0 for swap size partition, doesn't Android need swap space similar to Unix/Linux OS's?
thanks in advance
dano10 said:
I've been running latest SmoothBean for some time and it appears to be the most stable JB version out there. Always open to other opinions. I'm an old IT guy with years of Windows/Unix/Linux experience and I've had Mepis Linux on my desktop in the past, for 2-3 years, but went back to Windows 7/8. Anyway I noticed the install instructions say format the internal SD storage 4096/0 but it seems to run fine with 2048/0 so just wondering what the reasoning is for the increased partition size when it seems to run fine with 2048?
Also why 0 for swap size partition, doesn't Android need swap space similar to Unix/Linux OS's?
thanks in advance
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The reason behind the bigger Data partition is that the cache is symlinked to a portion of the data partition rather then the standard cache partition on the nand. While testing I to ran it at 2048 without any issue, up until I added a crap load of apps that hogged up that partition. So maxing out the data partition was the recommendation. As far as adding swap space that is not necessary since the boot.img will not use it. There are scripts that can be made to add it, but it is pointless since Zram is far better and work. In a terminal Emulator app just type in (free) and you will see that swap is already recognizing the zram and using it.