Title says it all, i'v'e spent the last like 6 hours trying to set up my SD card for apps2sd. I'm using this rom: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=715180&highlight=apps2sd Which does infact support a2sd. Just need help with this SD thing.
I want to set this up by atleast sunday, going on vacation, want to buy a bunch of games for the plane ride.
Help Please!
The easiest way by far is to use GPARTED in Ubuntu.
Just plug your phone up via usb and go.
There is a guide for it somewhere in the slide forums.
As faud said, go to the Ubuntu home page and download the live cd, you can boot straight into Ubuntu without having to install it, and then run gparted.
Is your sd card already formatted with an ext2 partition? If no, by all means use gparted, as the others have said. It will re-partition and re-format the card in one easy step.
If you already have an ext2 partition (and possibly have apps already installed), then one Linux command will do the trick (without destroying what you have on your ext2 partition.)
Code:
#tune2fs -j /dev/<foobar>
Where <foobar> is the device node for your ext2 partition (should be something like sdb or sdc, etc.)
Just use ROM Manager to do it.
While I've done this on a PC before, I've never tried this on Android, and I'm not sure if anything changes, so I thought I'd ask for advice!
This is how the internal SD card is partitioned at stock (8GB model):
Code:
[/data (RFS) 2GB][ /sdcard (FAT32) 6GB ]
This is how it is partitioned in the voodoo kernel:
Code:
[/data (RFS) 200MB][ EXT4 1.6GB ][ /sdcard (FAT32) 6GB ]
Okay, so changing /data requires a kernel mod, since it can't be unmounted at runtime, and it's RFS so it can't be resized afaik. I don't really have a problem with flashing the kernel, but a lot of people I've talked to aren't really happy with it. Plus, samsung has put changes into the kernel that aren't available in the source yet. Plus Froyo.
So I want to do the following:
Code:
[/data (RFS) 2GB][ /sdcard (FAT32) 3GB ][ EXT2/EXT4 3GB]
Since /sdcard can be unmounted at runtime, there should be no issue unmounting it, resizing it since it's just FAT32, changing the partition size, and then making a new partition with the left over space and formatting that as EXT2/EXT4 and then using normal symlinks.
So, the questions!
1) Any safety issues? I can't see any.
2) I've been spoiled by tools like gnu parted - how would I do the partition changing on Android? Should I just port gnu parted over? Has someone done this already?
3) Resizing FAT32 - same thing, parted should do it fine though.
Thanks a lot if you can help answer any of this! If I can get answers to this, I should have a very very nice cross-firmware/cross-variant lagfix that will help out a ton of people.
Is EXT2/EXT4 supported by Windows/Mac/Linux computer, when connecting the phone to the computer? Because in that case I would just change the whole 6GB to EXT.
I'd like to check which type of file system I use in my phone. EXT4 or FAT. How can I do it?
It is ext or rfs, depends on what rom you are running
Sent from my GT-S5660 using xda premium
If you are on stock you are using RFS. If you are on a custom rom depends on the developer to developer.
CyanogenMod as compiled by Phiexz uses EXT for sure. I believe the ArpegGioMod ROM compiled by Darkshado uses RFS.
In my case, that depends: Versions 0.8 and below used RFS. 0.9 switches to ext4.
To know which file system is used, open the terminal (or adb shell) and type the "mount" command. It will list all mounted partitions and their file system, as well as mounting options in use.
To support ext4, you need a compatible kernel (the stock Samsung kernels aren't.) plus the proper ramdisk scripts in your boot.img.
Update: I've since made a flashable zip that automatically creates a modified sdcard1 binary and extracts an init.d script to handle it all. Will make a thread in a more general location as this could be used on many TouchWiz devices. Link.
Hello everyone,
The mailman brought me a new 64GB microSD card this morning, and I wanted to try formatting it in ext4 instead of exFAT. Both for the heck of it and in case I wanted to give AOSP ROMs a try down the road.
The usual caveats apply.
Required:
init.d support
a mounting script
a mounting updater-script for custom recoveries.
You can get init.d support with the stock kernel on many devices by having the run-parts command launch from a custom install-recovery.sh script. See the following thread for files and a how-to:
[MOD]Term-init & Zip-init: Enable Init.d for Any Phones w/o Need of Custom Kernels!!!
SD card removal:
Should you need to remove the card it can be unmounted and safely removed from the storage settings as usual. Mounting it again requires either a reboot or manually executing the mount command and then activating the card in the storage settings.
Mounting script:
Make sure you have proper line endings, file name (e.g. 95mountsdext4) and permissions set.
Code:
#!/system/bin/sh
# Mount SD Card Ext4 Script
mount -rw -t ext4 /dev/block/mmcblk1p1 /storage/extSdCard
Mounting in CWM/TWRP:
The other piece in this is the attached zip file, which simply runs the appropriate mount command for Clockworkmod Recovery. Unmount as usual. This way you can also store nandroid backups and other update zips on the external as well.
Technical considerations:
The mounting occurs early enough during the boot process that the media scanner and MTP services have no issues with this.
There may be are some permissions related glitches to look out for, but it hasn't been an issue for me so far. (One possible fix would be a recursive chmod/chown added to the mounting script.)
Update: The camera app saves the photos properly to the SD card, but leaves them with improper permissions which prevent subsequent viewing or editing again until you chmod the files. To be continued...
If your init.d support comes from the install-recovery.sh trick, CWM will prompt to delete the script before reboot. Don't.
If the mounting script doesn't run for some reason, or you try to activate the card before having mounted it manually, the phone will give an error and ask if you want to format the card. Don't.
Enjoy,
Darkshado
I have been looking for a way to do this for a long time for numerous reasons (symlinks, >4GB file size, linux-only environment, etc.). I'll be giving this a try very soon.
Thanks for sharing!
EDIT: Just wanted to add that I think it's ridiculous Android doesn't support this natively.
The permissions issues are frustrating. I can take photos and store them on the card, but the umask for JB has been set as 077, in other words, rwx------ permissions, and ownership by the application's user.
I tried different arguments for the mount command to try and force permissions and ownership one way or another with no luck so far. Ironically, an NTFS formatted card might work better in this respect.
A similar mod had been made on the Nexus S and one of the posters resorted to an apk that regularly ran chmod -R 0777 on new files, I tried using it but it just hung there and did nothing on the Note II.
Another possibility would be using FUSE, although I'm not sure how to go about doing this yet.
Also, I pondered the possibility of using UDF instead of ext4, it is a standardized format and just about every major OS out there supports it too...
Any updates? Is it working already or...?
Despite all the good of Android, Google/carriers, whoever, not including ext2/3/4 support natively is just a slap in the face. Good to see someone working to right a wrong that subjugating software has done.
You should NOT be doing this. The Android hardware requirements clearly state that all shared storage directories must be case insensitive and must not have permissions. FAT32 is the only supported filesystem which meets these requirements. Mounting an EXT filesystem directly will break applications.
The newer versions of Android come with an "sdcard" utility which uses a FUSE driver to wrap a native EXT filesystem and exposes a pseudo filesystem which is case insensitive and is without permissions. You should mount the EXT SD card at a different location (/dev/fuse) and use the "sdcard" utility to emulate it at /storage/whatever. You can see the command line syntax of the "sdcard" utility in the source code.
CM10.1 does this automatically. https://github.com/CyanogenMod/android_system_core/tree/cm-10.1/sdcard
KurianOfBorg said:
You should NOT be doing this. The Android hardware requirements clearly state that all shared storage directories must be case insensitive and must not have permissions. FAT32 is the only supported filesystem which meets these requirements. Mounting an EXT filesystem directly will break applications.
The newer versions of Android come with an "sdcard" utility which uses a FUSE driver to wrap a native EXT filesystem and exposes a pseudo filesystem which is case insensitive and is without permissions. You should mount the EXT SD card at a different location (/dev/fuse) and use the "sdcard" utility to emulate it at /storage/whatever. You can see the command line syntax of the "sdcard" utility in the source code.
CM10.1 does this automatically. https://github.com/CyanogenMod/android_system_core/tree/cm-10.1/sdcard
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Again, Android not natively supporting ext4 is a slap in the face. Usability over technical merit disgusts me.
muqali said:
Again, Android not natively supporting ext4 is a slap in the face. Usability over technical merit disgusts me.
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It does support EXT4! Officially. All Google ROMs and AOSP can mount EXT4 partitions as /storage/*. The correct way to mount it is to use the command "sdcard" not "mount". I'm pretty sure any AOSP ROM will automatically mount an EXT4 SD card using the "sdcard" command just like Cyanogenmod does.
Thanks for the info. I'll look into this soon-ish, once my exams are over.
Sent from my SGH-T889V using xda app-developers app
KurianOfBorg said:
It does support EXT4! Officially. All Google ROMs and AOSP can mount EXT4 partitions as /storage/*. The correct way to mount it is to use the command "sdcard" not "mount". I'm pretty sure any AOSP ROM will automatically mount an EXT4 SD card using the "sdcard" command just like Cyanogenmod does.
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It's still a second class citizen to a xFATx filesystem.
muqali said:
It's still a second class citizen to a xFATx filesystem.
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Click to collapse
No it's fully supported by AOSP exactly the same as FAT on AOSP and exFAT/NTFS on Samsung ROMs. It's the manufacturer's fault for REMOVING support from their ROM. When you insert an EXT SD card on AOSP, it gets mounted at /storage/* just like any other SD card.
In my N7100 with CM 10.1, ext4 has stopped working for my 32gb SDCard on 05-01-2013 nightly, even after reformatting, going back to stock, then reinstalling CM 10.1. I also noticed that my ext4 formatted 8GB SdCard still works, however, so I am not sure if it's a storage size issue in my case (32gb vs 8gb). I am trying a hybrid of 8mb fat32 / 28.*gb ext4 to see if that will work.
KurianOfBorg said:
No it's fully supported by AOSP exactly the same as FAT on AOSP and exFAT/NTFS on Samsung ROMs. It's the manufacturer's fault for REMOVING support from their ROM. When you insert an EXT SD card on AOSP, it gets mounted at /storage/* just like any other SD card.
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clearday said:
In my N7100 with CM 10.1, ext4 has stopped working for my 32gb SDCard on 05-01-2013 nightly, even after reformatting, going back to stock, then reinstalling CM 10.1. I also noticed that my ext4 formatted 8GB SdCard still works, however, so I am not sure if it's a storage size issue in my case (32gb vs 8gb). I am trying a hybrid of 8mb fat32 / 28.*gb ext4 to see if that will work.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Is it formatted properly as ext4? Using mke2fs or (tune2fs to convert to ext4). All ROMs only mount the first partition on the SD card regardless of the file system. Sometime after mounting USB Mass Storage an the SD card doesn't remount properly so you need to reboot the device. You'll most probably want to use MTP with ext4 anyway.
KurianOfBorg said:
Is it formatted properly as ext4? Using mke2fs or (tune2fs to convert to ext4). All ROMs only mount the first partition on the SD card regardless of the file system. Sometime after mounting USB Mass Storage an the SD card doesn't remount properly so you need to reboot the device. You'll most probably want to use MTP with ext4 anyway.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Finally fixed the problem by running this command in ROM Toolbox Lite:
"find /storage/sdcard1/ -print0 | xargs -0 chown root:media_rw"
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=38182488#post38182488
clearday said:
Finally fixed the problem by running this command in ROM Toolbox Lite:
"find /storage/sdcard1/ -print0 | xargs -0 chown root:media_rw"
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=38182488#post38182488
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Click to collapse
Then it's not mounted properly! Your ext4 SD card has directly been mounted at /storage/* instead of through the FUSE driver. You should NOT be able to see permissions when it's mounted at /storage/*. The physical partition should be mounted at /dev/fuse. Reboot the device and check again whether permissions are visible at /storage/*.
KurianOfBorg said:
Then it's not mounted properly! Your ext4 SD card has directly been mounted at /storage/* instead of through the FUSE driver. You should NOT be able to see permissions when it's mounted at /storage/*. The physical partition should be mounted at /dev/fuse. Reboot the device and check again whether permissions are visible at /storage/*.
Click to expand...
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It's still visible at storage
How do I fix it?
clearday said:
It's still visible at storage
How do I fix it?
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Click to collapse
It should show up at /storege/* but that should be the FUSE driver's mount point with permissions stripped away. The real ext4 partition will be at /dev/fuse.
Any further progress?
I want to use symlinks and ext4 on my note 2 also.
On aosp roms just use the sdcard binary with an initd script.
Gesendet von meinem GT-N7105 mit Tapatalk 2
DerTeufel1980 said:
On aosp roms just use the sdcard binary with an initd script.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm trying to do this on Tweaked. There is an sdcard binary, however, it appears to be modified by Samsung as it's hardcoded to mount to /storage/sdcard0 and overrides the internal sdcard mount when I use it. It doesn't take a destination parameter like the AOSP/CM version does.
If anyone has an AOSP/CM build environment, could I trouble you for a statically linked version of the sdcard binary? I downloaded CM10.2-nightly, but it's dynamically linked and, of course, doesn't work on the stock based ROMs.
EDIT
It might still be nice, but I figured out a way around it. I hex edited the sdcard binary from the Note2 to use /storage/sdcard1. Then in the mount script, bind mounted it over to /storage/extSdCard. I've rebooted a few times and it seems to be working fine. I am copying data to it over MTP right now. I've attached a zip of the files I'm using.
NOTE: THIS IS NOT A FLASHABLE ZIP.
I might make one later, but this kind of needs to be a manual process anyway.
put the sdcard1 file in /system/xbin
chmod 755 /system/xbin/sdcard1
put the script file in /etc/init.d
set permissions/ownership on it
Now, if you have an ext4 formatted SD, and it's not mounted, you should be able to run the script and have it mount it, run the sdcard1 binary on it, and bind mount it over to the normal extSdCard spot. It will happen at boot if you got it all right.
There are probably improvements that can be made, my shell scripting is a bit rusty. Hopefully this will get people interested in it again, now that the permissions issues are resolved.
I'm using my phone to compile ghostscript. Because it executes some programs to compile, it has to be done on the hardware it's being compiled for.
The phone has an ARHD ROM, and ElementalX kernel. It's been installed fresh recently (within the last week,) with the latest of both.
When linking a large executable, make is getting killed.
I attempted to make a 1GB, 512MB, and 50MB swap file on both the internal and external sd's. Failed on all.
Has anyone got a working swap setup?