Develop Bugs

[Q] Merge wasted EMMC with SD card?

My HTC Incredible has 8GiB of internal flash available for use. I assume some other Android devices also have a good amount of internal flash.
I have a 32GiB microSD card, but I'd like to add in that other 8GiB, as it's a substantial amount.
I can put things there from adb, or some file managers, but a lot of apps don't access it and mounting the flash to /sdcard and then swapping back gets old.
So, idea -- would it be possible to "merge" the two by a trick of mounting (sort of like JBoD RAID) and get the entire 40GiB under /sdcard? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_mount
I believe UnionFS and AUFS can do this, and I believe Cyanogenmod already has the latter. Has anyone tried making use of that otherwise nearly-wasted chunk of space?
Thanks.

I modified my vold.fstab file to trick the phone into thinking one was the other, but for what your asking I don't think can be done. Symlinks aren't possible using FAT32 (which is what we have the sdcard and emmc formatted as) so that's out. Overall I can't think of any way to do it. Not sure what you're thinking about there with CM, it most assuredly doesn't do that. Also, there are only a small handful of other devices that have emmc's out there, the majority only have sdcards.

[Q] Swap internal and external SD

In older versions of Android the external SD would be mounted as /mnt/sdcard but now that is used for the internal memory and the external SD is now /mnt/sdcard/external_sd. This is a bit of a problem as some apps can only save to /mnt/sdcard and it quickly takes up our phone's internal memory. I have offline GPS maps and a few Gameloft games which can only save their data to /mnt/sdcard and as you can imagine free space is very limited.
What I would like is to switch this around. Basically I have a 32GB SD card that I would like to use a storage for some of my apps as it is not being fully utilized. I've searched around and it doesn't seem like there is an easy way to do this. I'm not completely sure but it seems like there are methods that might be specific to different phones which requires modifying a file in /system/etc.
Will this safely work for our phone?

check this topic
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1458153&page=3
posts 21 to 25 and 33 & 34..
For Recovery swapping has been tried..
You may get some idea..

Maybe the use of symbolic links could help, but I never tried it on an Android device.

I had read people Mapping the External under a directory for example the Games directory and therefore all games would in theory be on the External. I think this is what you mentioned as symbolic links.

How can you do that. I tryed a million things. Last time i installed literom with added swap internal memory to sd mod. And after i copy something in phone i loose the mobile signal. I guess the card is getting corrupted or something. How can i make it so the sd card wont be unmounted when i plug the phone in pc ?

Might want to consider this:
Root External 2 Internal SD
I've not used this specific one myself but I have used similar apps in the past.

I didn't use that yet.
But what i found untill now
1. Using Directory Bind wich makes a link between actual place of the files and where they should be. Example You put com.xxx.xxx in your SD card and set the progam to tell android when is looking into sdcard/android/data/com.xxx.xxx go for files in sdcard/external_sd/com.xxx.xxx
This method is good for games and files for them
2. Another thing is modifing vold.fstab and swapping the way adroid mounts those partitions. (this option is buggy somehow)

Use external_sd as main storage

it seems to me that my 3.7 gig of internal memory gets full really quick. i was wondering if the was a permanent solution to having the phone read the actual memory card as its default setting?

Assuming you have a rooted phone, open the file:
ect/vold.fstab
Change the details to the following:
# internal sdcard
{
ums_path = /sys/devices/platform/usb_mass_storage/lun0/file
asec = enable
discard = enable
format_option = -r 2236
}
dev_mount sdcard1 /mnt/sdcard/external_sd 11 /devices/platform/s3c-mshci.0/mmc_host/mmc0/mmc0
# external sdcard
{
ums_path = /sys/devices/platform/usb_mass_storage/lun1/file
asec = disable
}
dev_mount sdcard /mnt/sdcard auto /devices/platform/s3c-sdhci.2/mmc_host/mmc1​
Source: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=21598532
One of the very first things I did with my Glide after rooting. I hope that helps.

nice tweak man will do that as well when i get the phone and root and install new rom.

Just in case it wasn't obvious to anyone, you should only change the bolded parts listed here, the rest of the file doesn't actually match our devices. For the curious, here's what ours looks like:
# internal sdcard
{
ums_path = /sys/devices/platform/usb_mass_storage/lun0/file
asec = enable
discard = enable
}
dev_mount sdcard1 /mnt/sdcard/external_sd 4 /devices/platform/sdhci-tegra.3/mmc_host/mmc0/mmc0
# external sdcard
{
ums_path = /sys/devices/platform/usb_mass_storage/lun1/file
asec = disable
}
dev_mount sdcard /mnt/sdcard auto /devices/platform/sdhci-tegra.2/mmc_host/mmc1/mmc1​
Also note that after this change, I'm having issues with the drives staying mounted on the PC. I've not bothered to look into it more just yet, as I'm currently stock again, copying everything off the internal memory before swapping mounts again.

bakageta said:
Just in case it wasn't obvious to anyone, you should only change the bolded parts listed here, the rest of the file doesn't actually match our devices.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah, I wanted to add that after I posted, but I wasn't allowed to edit my post due to my low post count. Thanks for pointing that out to everyone for me. =]

So, as I mentioned, after modifying vold.fstab I'm having a problem with usb mass storage. After mounting the sd card and internal memory to the pc, copying files directly from one drive to the other causes the phone to unmount both drives and drop the usb connection for a brief moment. I didn't have any problem doing this prior to the mod.
Other than that, it stays mounted fine. As long as I copy files to or from the PC before moving them between the internal memory and SD card, everything works as expected, and I've copied large amounts of data to and from both to test.
Anyone else running this having similar problems? I'm on the rooted stock 2.3.5, with Aradat's kernel v1.2. I did snag a log of what's going on, if anyone wants to poke through it and see if they spot something that looks out of place.

So, with the ICS update our vold.fstab changed. Here's both the original, and a modified one with this swap, for anyone who wants it. It works pretty much as expected.

I just use link2sd to store stuff onto sd card. The stock storage is a problem for me!
Sent from my SGH-I927 using Tapatalk 2

I did swap the external for the main and I must tell you, it is sweet to not have to worry about space anymore.
I have a 32GB card that I would never remove so this was just what I was looking for thanks guys!..
The only thing I had issues was Titanium backup started to complain because I did not change where it was pointing to before I made the switch, so I had to clear it's data in settings then it started fine.
PS before I did this change I made sure to format the SDCARD (4gb internal) and this made a nice clean Partition for CWM!

Will this work on the New ICS Rom?

bakageta said:
So, with the ICS update our vold.fstab changed. Here's both the original, and a modified one with this swap, for anyone who wants it. It works pretty much as expected.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes. The internal memory doesn't get mounted on boot for some reason, but you can just go to settings > storage and mount it, and everything works as expected, so I'm too lazy to poke around and see what the issue is.

bakageta said:
So, with the ICS update our vold.fstab changed. Here's both the original, and a modified one with this swap, for anyone who wants it. It works pretty much as expected.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for this update. I hadn't even thought to look into making my phone utilize the 32GB micro sd card I had in it as main memory and stumbled on this thread looking for something else. Currently I am moving what I want to keep from the internal 4GB before I format it and maybe use it for my Titanium Backup storage, who knows. Thanks button for everybody!

Yeah, it's very handy. CWMR still uses the internal memory by default, so I just use it for storing roms and nandroid backups, with everything I actually use on my 32gb.

does you need to format you sdcard (32gb one) as ext3 or 4?

My 32gb was formatted in a microsd card reader on my pc, as fat32, and has no issues. I can't speak for the 64gb.

good to know, thanks

bakageta said:
So, with the ICS update our vold.fstab changed. Here's both the original, and a modified one with this swap, for anyone who wants it. It works pretty much as expected.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Tanks bakageta.
[edit]
Nevermind. No automounting on internal storage is a known issue.

bakageta said:
Yes. The internal memory doesn't get mounted on boot for some reason, but you can just go to settings > storage and mount it, and everything works as expected, so I'm too lazy to poke around and see what the issue is.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I cleaned up the vold.fstab a little bit and solved the non-automounting issue. I also marked the external SD card as encryptable and non-removable since it's now a fairly primary storage area.
Now both SD areas are mounted properly on bootup.
Updated .zip attached. :good:

oh that sound good, i think i will use it as well.
as i have some applications and data installed on the internal memory should i
just copy everything i have with sd explorer (or even just tar the all thing to root
of the microsd card and then extract it for better permissions) and then chage the
vold.fstab file, than format the internal memory?
BTW lambgx02, does your update files is for ICS only or also for the GB?
if i'm not mistaken the original GB version didn't' include the encryption and non-removable option.
maybe you can tweak it as well?

taiber2000 said:
oh that sound good, i think i will use it as well.
as i have some applications and data installed on the internal memory should i
just copy everything i have with sd explorer (or even just tar the all thing to root
of the microsd card and then extract it for better permissions) and then chage the
vold.fstab file, than format the internal memory?
BTW lambgx02, does your update files is for ICS only or also for the GB?
if i'm not mistaken the original GB version didn't' include the encryption and non-removable option.
maybe you can tweak it as well?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Easiest way is to plug in to a PC via USB and drag and drop everything you want from one volume to the other. Remember that your apps might get confused if they were configured to use external_sd (since everything will now be moved to sdcard).
A benefit of using USB is that the volumes will be unmounted from the device, so you don't have to worry about apps reading/writing while you're working.
As soon as you're done, eject the volumes (but don't pull the USB cable), update the vold.fstab file and reboot. This will ensure no sdcard-aware app will be restarted before your mounts have been swapped.
Regarding my vold.fstab, I've only tried on the ICS build, not Gingerbread so ... not sure if it'll work or not. Why not just use the original version posted by the OP for Gingerbread?

I'm stumped

Hi everybody. I am trying to get my daughters phone set up. She is 20, very busy, and I only get the phone an hour or so at a time which is frustrating. I have modded my own android phones(Note, Infuse,Gnex) so I'm not a beginner, but this captivate glide is acting a little different.
Here is where I am. CWM is installed and a backup of 2.3.6 is done, and a copy saved on my laptop. I have ardatdat's 1.2 version kernel ready to flash for root and to remove the IQcarrier junk. She will probably stay on stock, rooted since she is not into teching her phone but does want to remove ads and maybe tether to a tablet occasionally on ATT without a tethering plan- tit BU and freezing or removing the tethering manager.
I am having trouble getting the phone to recognize an 8 gb sd card. I have repartitioned it so more apps can be moved over(primary fat32 and logical-ext 2) and split the card to 4gb and 4gb.(approx)- even when just left as a one partition card with 8gb fat 32 the phone just won't recognize it. I put the old 2gb card into the phone and that one is recognized but is from a non android phone- an LG xenon.
I want to put the zip files to flash on the external sd card along with a few apk's ti install with the appinstaller. But.. the phone won't see the files. Do I have to use the internal storage?????
Don't have the phone now- it's off to work with her. So I will try later tonite. Any suggestions??
Thanks. Open for any help here. I have never had this much trouble before! Have searched for sideloading apk's, but from what I am finding it has to be rooted first??? I have checked unknown sources for install of 3rd party apps and usb debugging also checked.
I will continue my hunting for info. I'm sure it's just basic stuff I'm just not seeing. Thanks again

Ah. CWM Recovery is not compatible with the external sd card, I believe. It's located under /sdcard/external_sd but the zips are invisible in the recovery. So yes, I think you have to use internal

Aquethys said:
Ah. CWM Recovery is not compatible with the external sd card, I believe. It's located under /sdcard/external_sd but the zips are invisible in the recovery. So yes, I think you have to use internal
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for that. Did not read that anywhere! Any idea about apks on the external sd card?

Ive tried that too... The apps are located in the data partition on the kernel so that is already directed to internal... The only things most people put are Media like movies because music players scan the entire /sdcard partition and the /external_sd is in it.
Hope this helped ^o^
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I927R using xda premium

sashusmom said:
I am having trouble getting the phone to recognize an 8 gb sd card. I have repartitioned it so more apps can be moved over(primary fat32 and logical-ext 2) and split the card to 4gb and 4gb.(approx)- even when just left as a one partition card with 8gb fat 32 the phone just won't recognize it. I put the old 2gb card into the phone and that one is recognized but is from a non android phone- an LG xenon.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You may need to format the sd card in the phone itself to get it to show up, some people have had problems with cards formatted in other devices or a pc.
I haven't tried a dual partition card in the Glide, but I came from a Motorola Flipside which had an absolutely tiny amount of space for apps, making link2sd and the second partition virtually mandatory. The Glide, however, has 2gb internal memory for apps, and the ~3.75gb internal memory that's mounted as /sdcard that you can store apps on with the standard Move to SD build into android, so I can't imagine anyone needing more storage than that for standard apps.
You can always points Titanium Backup to /sdcard/external_sd, my backup folder tends to get pretty big since I keep multiple backups. If she's installing a ton of games that have extra downloads to the sdcard though, you can fill up the internal "sd card" pretty quickly, and there's only a couple of ways to deal with that. She can give you the phone after installing those games and downloading the extra data, and you can manually move the data over to the external SD and create symlinks yourself, which can be tedious.
Alternatively, you can modify the vold.fstab to change the mount points, putting the real external sd as /sdcard and the internal storage as /sdcard/external_sd. There's instructions for this here. The vold.fstab method is what I personally use, as I've got a 32gb sd card and far too many games that want to download 500mb+ each.

bakageta said:
You may need to format the sd card in the phone itself to get it to show up, some people have had problems with cards formatted in other devices or a pc.
I haven't tried a dual partition card in the Glide, but I came from a Motorola Flipside which had an absolutely tiny amount of space for apps, making link2sd and the second partition virtually mandatory. The Glide, however, has 2gb internal memory for apps, and the ~3.75gb internal memory that's mounted as /sdcard that you can store apps on with the standard Move to SD build into android, so I can't imagine anyone needing more storage than that for standard apps.
You can always points Titanium Backup to /sdcard/external_sd, my backup folder tends to get pretty big since I keep multiple backups. If she's installing a ton of games that have extra downloads to the sdcard though, you can fill up the internal "sd card" pretty quickly, and there's only a couple of ways to deal with that. She can give you the phone after installing those games and downloading the extra data, and you can manually move the data over to the external SD and create symlinks yourself, which can be tedious.
Alternatively, you can modify the vold.fstab to change the mount points, putting the real external sd as /sdcard and the internal storage as /sdcard/external_sd. There's instructions for this here. The vold.fstab method is what I personally use, as I've got a 32gb sd card and far too many games that want to download 500mb+ each.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi and thanks. I just read about that mod. Is it as straightforward as just rewriting that file in rootexplorer? It sounds too easy!
I was gonna format the sd card in the phone but was not sure it would format the internal card and not the external one since I can't seem to get it recognized. I would be in big do do if I erased her stuff!!! It might be a bad card and I'll try an alternate one.

Yep, it's really as easy as snagging the file, editing it, and rewriting it in root explorer (or a shell, I haven't bought root explorer so I tend to do things from the shell). As for formatting in the phone, it should list both an SD card and USB storage, the usb storage is the internal storage, and the sd card is actually the sd card, it *should* have a format option there if the card is good, even if it's not seeing the files on it.

Thank you all!!!!!
bakageta said:
Yep, it's really as easy as snagging the file, editing it, and rewriting it in root explorer (or a shell, I haven't bought root explorer so I tend to do things from the shell). As for formatting in the phone, it should list both an SD card and USB storage, the usb storage is the internal storage, and the sd card is actually the sd card, it *should* have a format option there if the card is good, even if it's not seeing the files on it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Piece of cake!!!!! :highfive: We now have the external sd card (only 8gb for now) mounted instead. Whoever came up with that very clever work around is genius. That's better than apps2sd or link2sd.
Thank you so much to everyone who responded. Between all of you I have Rooted with the kernel on the internal card, and the appinstaller saw the apks when I put them on the internal card. My original 8gb card was bad. It was a cheap one- $5 or $8 dollars. I got 2 and the 2nd one works fine- formatted in my computer and phone saw it immediately. I transferred the stuff from the internal to the external. Did I need to do that? I left it on the internal incase the sd card is removed. Tethering manager is removed- att junk is frozen.
One more question if I may? If another rom is flashed, or I odin back to stock for whatever reason, does this sd card switch stay, or is it overwritten with the new rom? Just need to know what to do if I ever need to reset this phone.
I also added my google account to the market to put my paid apps on her phone but when I signed in to the play store under my account my paid apps did not show as paid. Anyone know why? I worked around it but I was surprised.
Again thanks to such a nice group of people! :highfive: I had a crash course in the captivate glide in 24 hrs. You gave me info here I don't think I could have found with continued searching.

sashusmom said:
I transferred the stuff from the internal to the external. Did I need to do that? I left it on the internal incase the sd card is removed. Tethering manager is removed- att junk is frozen.
One more question if I may? If another rom is flashed, or I odin back to stock for whatever reason, does this sd card switch stay, or is it overwritten with the new rom? Just need to know what to do if I ever need to reset this phone.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Moving everything that was on the internal memory to the SD card was a good call, since you swapped the mount points everything that stored stuff on the internal memory will now expect that stuff to be on the sd card. There's no need to keep it on the internal memory (you can delete everything there and it'll recreate LOST.DIR) unless you plan on swapping back at any point, in which case you could just copy stuff across before swapping back.
As for flashing another rom, that'll require you edit the vold.fstab again unless the rom has already made that change, which none of our existing roms have.
Personally, I keep the internal memory completely empty as far as daily use things go. CWR will store its backups there, as it mounts the memory independently of the vold.fstab, and all roms/kernels/etc you want to flash can go there, leaving the sd card free for things you actually use.

Bak- thank you so much for all the info. I saved the original file and I will make a copy of the edited mount file in case I need it again. If I ever get her phone back I will clear the internal card since that info is now on the external one.
I wonder how long this captivate glide will hold up with my daughter. She is very hard on her cell phones. Already case #1 broke due to a drop. 2 more are on the way. When I pointed out it could have been the phone broken she said- yeah, I know. I'll keep the case on. :victoryshe hates cases!) Hopefully this phone will get her thru her senior year in college!
Thank you everyone who pitched in to get me the info I needed to get it going. :laugh:

Raid sd's?

Is it at all possible, to raid the internal and external sd's to act as one hard drive? I don;t like the fact they are separated, i would rather have them as one single hard drive.

i have never heard of this on a Phone with Sdcard, closes thing to that would be Apps2sd card, which you partition the sdcad to ext4?(correct if wrong) and phone sees it as internal phone storage, which gives you a bigger amount to store data/ and still have a fat32 partition

ilostchild said:
i have never heard of this on a Phone with Sdcard, closes thing to that would be Apps2sd card, which you partition the sdcad to ext4?(correct if wrong) and phone sees it as internal phone storage, which gives you a bigger amount to store data/ and still have a fat32 partition
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I could be missing something, but to me it looks like if you use any other filesystem than vfat (fat32), Android will claim its a blank memory card...
I tried both Ext2 and Ext4, have to mount it manual (which is working), tried updating the vold.fstab but it doesnt seem to work with other filesystems than factory default.
Would it be correct to assume that Android has its own way of mounting things rather than using the already existing functions in the kernel ?
If so, then it would probably be possible to make things like software raid but android would not be able to start it nor mount it during startup (vold.fstab)
Maybe someone can make sense of all this...

i know , there are some lines in the build.prop for a second sd card. maybe , changing does those lines to no . could make one sd for the system
maybe android 4+ need its cuz all of the new htc phones have them
i know this is off topic . on jmz rom totemc2 have the setting disappear from the try menu and quick settings . mine did