Develop Bugs

[Q] Any uses for /system folder? (Rooted Phone)

I've a strange question that might or might belong in the development thread, but figured since it's a question, I'll try here first.
I'm using a Stock DeOxed Rooted Rom on my EVO.
I recently installed a few more apps and saw this pesky little warning about low on space.
When I went into my "SystemPanel" app to see how much space was left exactly and noticed that my /data folder only had around 30megs out of it's 428M available.
Ok.. time to delete some apps I thought, but then I noticed that my /system folder (Where I presume pre-installed apps live) had almost 1/3 of it's space still available (115 out of 350megs available).
So I'm wondering.....
Is there some method that I can use to install Apps directly to this folder instead of the standard /data that apps appear to go to when installed?
Is it as simple as moving the APK file with Root Explorer, or are there some under the hood items in apps that prevent this sort of thing?
I've a few rather large apps that I cannot move to the SD card due to widget problems and the like but would be perfect for the system folder if I can find a way to move them there easily.
Thoughts?

DroidGnome said:
I've a strange question that might or might belong in the development thread, but figured since it's a question, I'll try here first.
I'm using a Stock DeOxed Rooted Rom on my EVO.
I recently installed a few more apps and saw this pesky little warning about low on space.
When I went into my "SystemPanel" app to see how much space was left exactly and noticed that my /data folder only had around 30megs out of it's 428M available.
Ok.. time to delete some apps I thought, but then I noticed that my /system folder (Where I presume pre-installed apps live) had almost 1/3 of it's space still available (115 out of 350megs available).
So I'm wondering.....
Is there some method that I can use to install Apps directly to this folder instead of the standard /data that apps appear to go to when installed?
Is it as simple as moving the APK file with Root Explorer, or are there some under the hood items in apps that prevent this sort of thing?
I've a few rather large apps that I cannot move to the SD card due to widget problems and the like but would be perfect for the system folder if I can find a way to move them there easily.
Thoughts?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
/system/app is where system apps are kept. If I remember correctly, any app can be installed into there, but you have to do through flashing an update.zip if I'm remembering properly. You may be able to take the apk that's in /data/app for the app you want to move and move it to /system/app, but I'm not sure if that will work properly or not. Someone who cooks ROMs might know more.
Also, you can partition your sd card and use true apps2sd with most ROMs. Its a little bit of work and will shorten the life of your card, but that gives you a lot more room if you need it.

I don't know that there's a way to move user apps to system. It's very possible there is a way, I've just never seen any posts about it. Apps 2 SD is usually the way to go.
ps. 30 megs?!?! Geez, how many apps do you have?
Sent from my SUPERSONIC

Easy peasy
First, use a true apk backup tool to backup e apk files you want to move. Titanium backup will NOT work because it compresses and distorts, and we need true apk files. I recommend file manager by adao team. Just go to applications, check what you want, and hit backup. Next, get the apk files on your computer by mounting sd and copying files from backups folder. You will lose all app data, but what can you do? Next, adb push the files to system app folder while in recovery mode (just say so if you don't know how to do this and i will tell you) and reboot. Done. Tell me if it works well.
By the way, 30 megs???

Doesn't froyo install to the sdcard if you tell it to?
I thought a2sd was obsolete

You can put apps there after changing the folder's permissions but I wouldn't recommend it. Just not a good idea to put regular apps there.
Just install them to your SD card instead
Sent from my PC36100 using XDA App

go into the android app manager and go through all your programs and click on move to sd card...
they will all still occupy some space on your nand, but not nearly as much.

Thanks for the advice, I thought it might not be as easy as moving them, oh well, just seems a shame for there to be over 100 megs I cannot do anything with.
I already had moved all I could to the SD card prior to posting this, but thanks for that advice as well, I'm sure others forget they can do that with Froyo.
As for the 30 megs I had left.. we'll it's back up to about 70 free which should be plenty for a while. (Remember we only have about 420 to start with).
Some of the big ones which could not be moved to the SD card are:
Swype (Deleted, took over 17megs)
TouchDown (12 megs.. must keep for tasks sync sadly)
Google Maps update (7.6 megs)
Documents to go (8megs)
A few various games that cannot yet be moved to the SD card at around 5megs each..
The rest are just lots of little apps.. I'm sort of an app junkie You should have seen my old Palm Centro... it was amazing!
According to Titanium, I currently have 194 'User apps', though I think a few are simply widgets, icon packs and the like.

Apps on SD disappeared???

Hi everyone,
In panic mode right now...
I downloaded an app that helps you find all your apps that can be moved to the sd card. So it found 150 or so. After an hour of manually moving each one, I had over 400mb of free internal space and only like 40 apps left on the main phone storage. Awesome... but then this morning I noticed that things were running real slow... so I rebooted my phone. When it came back up I noticed some of my home screen shortcuts had become generic android icons. I went to my launcher & lots of apps were missing. I have a LOT of apps so I can't quite confirm yet whether its all the apps I moved to sd but it seems that way.
When I go to the market I see apps that I had yesterday as not installed. I have astro but I'm not quite sure what folder to look in to see if the apps are all still there, just not being seen by the android system maybe?
I've been driving all morning so I haven't gotten to research this much yet. Just rebooted a couple times hoping to fix it but no luck yet.
Any help is majorly appreciated. As soon as I'm at a computer ill be working on this all day. Freakin disaster!
Dave
Sent from my T-Mobile G2 using XDA App

update to my question
so now that i'm in to work i can mess with this... quick update...
when i go to manage applications and go to "on SD card" i get a big list of apps that have the names like "cn.miren.browser" instead of Miren Browser and "com.alphonso.pulse" instead of Pulse which is kinda normal except usually they then refresh with the regular name and the size listed underneath. well it's been sitting here for 5 minutes now and hasn't change and it still says "Computing..." under each one and instead of the normal icons, its sort of a grayed out generic Android icon with an SD in the bottom right corner of the icon.
so clearly it still knows that these apps are there. it just maybe can't access them? i dont know. could it be the sd card? this is the original 8gb sd card that came with the g2...
any thoughts?

???
so i found out that the sd card had some errors in the file system. so i let windows fix the errors. no help (although my phone boots WAAAAAYYYYYY faster now).
so then i found that i have an extra 8gb microsd laying around (which also happened to be a better, class 6 one too). so i cleared it off and copied over alllll the files to it. booted up. STILL NO GO.
anyone have any ideas here? i'm really running out of ideas here.
when i boot, everything runs great, but all my apps that are installed to sd are gone. also it never says "preparing sd card" in the status bar when booting. then if i go to manage applications it never finishes "computing" the size of apps. if i go to "on sd" it shows all my apps, but says computing, and i can't access them, uninstall them, move them, etc. i'm totally out of ideas here and i really don't want to have to do a system restore.
anyone?

think im having the same problem . has ur market gone too?

fix?
ok so i ended up getting mine fixed using these steps that someone from a company that makes an apps2sd app sent me... the only difference i had to do was since my phone also wouldn't recognize my pc, i had to pop the sd card into my pc directly to delete the .android_secure folder... i don't want to mess up your phone or anything so make sure to read around a bit more before trying this, but this is what worked for me. after i started adding all my apps back one by one i've been fine ever since.:
"I guess the problem is ".android_secure" is not recognized by Android.
Would you try the following steps (I am not sure if it works)?
1. mount phone with PC
2. backup all files under .android_secure
3. delete .android_secure directory
4. unmount
5. try to move an app (any app) to SD card (it forces Android to
create .android_secure on SD)
6. mount phone with PC
7. restore all backuped .android_secure/* files to .android_secure
8. unmount => check if it recognized the apps that you moved to the SD card"

What is needed on the SD card

I have a 8gb sd card what are the bare necessities I should have on it. How do I know what I can safely delete. If I see folders with the names of apps that I no longer use, is that safe to delete? My card is half full. I also see folders with different rom names that I no longer have installed. I do manual full wipes 3x on everything when I reflash. Just looking for a little more knowledge in the sd storage area. Thanks guys

I usually backup the whole sd card while messing with this (then delete backup when I'm sure things are smooth)!
1. if you don't use it, LOSE it. (Is there an uninstaller that gets rid of all this crap?)
2. ...UNLESS you've uninstalled an app you plan on using again one day; keeps the settings; nice. Eg, sports apps that are out-of-season.
keep non-market *.apk files in /download so you don't have to hunt them down again, but clean out other downloads (pics, etc) that are trash. (Btw, the .apk files can add up; you can move them to computer, but I always keep at least a decent file mgr apk and Amazon Appstore apk on SD so I can easily get to work after a wipe/flash.)
Kernels, radios, etc: move to computer so there are no mishaps
PHOTOS: smash 'em all into one directory (I use /pictures) with subdirs if you want, point your photo apps to save to that directory. That'll get rid of a billion photo app directories :
(note: I also set default cam to save to SD card dir).
Also makes syncing with computer a breeze.)
MUSIC: have you tried Amazon Cloud or Google Cloud thing? (I have invites for latter if you want one)
Titanium Backup: one copy of user files (to get data); and use Dropbox (if you're Pro user) for redundant backup (it's saved me once!). But I'd keep ONE backup of user apps/data on SD just for convenience.
cwm ROMS: I keep a stable one or two via RomManager/backups, but I move the others to computer (until they're stupidly outdated).
Otherwise a good cache cleaner can keep **** clean on your SD card (and if you play too much with dirs of apps you use, it'll piss off the apps

SDcards get cluttered really easily when installing/uninstalling roms to test. I've always deleted the folders from old roms that I don't plan to reinstall later.

You can pretty much delete what ever you want from your sd as long as you dont want it. Apps will regenerate folders and files. Also if you want to keep some stuff but want more room on the sd there is always emmc with around 7gb free.

[Q] Random Memory Allocation?

Ok, I have a 16gig card, and had about 250 MB free, went to check, and over the space of a few days, not having taken many photos or videos, or downloading much, I was down to like 35MB, looking through my SD Card, I have loads of files and folders which I don't know what they are, some of them very small (CDAInfo on Root of SD Card, MEMSTICK.IND on Root of SD Card, etc. etc.) but some of them are quite large.
Also, looking through my Xperia Play games launcher, I have many apps that are doubled, and clicking on both opens it, so it's not just an empty container. Looking at my folders on the SD Card (.android_secure), I have things like flashplayer-1.asec and flashplayer-2.asec, each one is 16MB, and I have many of these duplicates for different apps and games. Now, I think that the .android_secure folder is used for when you move your apps to the SD Card, and I'm assuming that this occured when I flashed a new rom and reinstalled the apps (the data was created on the phone memory and then when I went to move it over, it created the 2nd version) but what I want to know is, how to AVOID this happening when I flash a new Rom, or basically, how do I avoid things like this happening.
Thanks,
Niall

Just went through the .android_secure deleting one of the multiples then checking if it still ran, it did, so I decided to delete one of all of them, and bam, all apps still run, and I'm up to 1GB of free space. The .asec files are what the phone moves to the memory card when you select move to SD in the settings. Obviously, if you are flashing a new rom it doesn't delete them, and then just creates a duplicate. Some old games that I don't play (have completed them) were still in there, some of them ridiculous sizes (Battle Bears - 47MB). Removed about 20 or so off the .asec files, most of them duplicates, some of them were unused apps, and am back up to 1Gig free.
Chuffed
Anyways, anyone know a way to avoid this happening, and also, as a word of warning to everyone...keep an eye out for things like this
Niall

Nhialor said:
Just went through the .android_secure deleting one of the multiples then checking if it still ran, it did, so I decided to delete one of all of them, and bam, all apps still run, and I'm up to 1GB of free space. The .asec files are what the phone moves to the memory card when you select move to SD in the settings. Obviously, if you are flashing a new rom it doesn't delete them, and then just creates a duplicate. Some old games that I don't play (have completed them) were still in there, some of them ridiculous sizes (Battle Bears - 47MB). Removed about 20 or so off the .asec files, most of them duplicates, some of them were unused apps, and am back up to 1Gig free.
Chuffed
Anyways, anyone know a way to avoid this happening, and also, as a word of warning to everyone...keep an eye out for things like this
Niall
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Have you been flashing roms and not deleting your old .android.secure folder? That will happen, you should delete it before you reflash

AndroHero said:
Have you been flashing roms and not deleting your old .android.secure folder? That will happen, you should delete it before you reflash
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
lol, yeah, i'm new enough to Android, but learning as I go along

Lost Vacation Photos While Moving to SD!

We were on our first vacation with our 2 year old and I took a day's worth of photos and at least an hour or two or video. I didn't realize the HTC camera app was saving to the internal SD and I hit my limit. I thought it was as clear as using Root Explorer to move the entire DCIM folder from the "storage" folder to the "sdcard" folder under the funny looking numbered folder that eventually points to the SD. In the process, it asked if I wanted to replace the target DCIM folder, and I thought sure, why not?
Now, my internal storage is barren and my SD card does not show the images I attempted to move... I'm in shock and sadness and currently trying to run FonePaw on the internal storage to see if It can recover anything. So far, it's found only the stuff I deleted months ago. There is the possibility while manipulating folders that I overwrote SD to internal somehow but I'm not sure how that might have happened.
I'm reluctant to install anything such as DiskDigger or Undelete Recover to the phone as that might overwrite more of what I'm trying to recover. Does anyone have any idea what I could have done and how I might get out of this mess? *sigh* MANY many thanks in advance to anyone that might be able to help out. I'm in such a state of sadness at the moment *double sigh*