Fire Stick 4K Non-Rooted with USB OTG and mounting - Fire TV Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

Hello, I have a FTV 4K Stick non-rooted with an 8 GB USB stick connected to it via OTG cable and wanting to move few apps and some app files (without moving the app itself) to it. It seems there are couple of ways to do it, but neither approach "seems" to give me the entirety of what I would like to do. In both cases, I start out with the USB formatted as FAT32 using Rufus.
Approach 1:
I insert the USB. Next, I run " sm list-disks" which correctly shows my USB. Next, I run " sm partition disk:8,0 private". I reboot FTV and when I run "df -h" or "cat /proc/self/mountinfo" or "cat /proc/self/mounts", I see this USB change its format to Ext4 and the mount point is at "/mnt/expand/GUID". With this I can move apps with "pm move-package PACKAGE GUID" to the USB and all is good. The problem is, I cannot drill into this mount point to see what is inside. I am assuming it has similar structure like the internal storage (like /Android/Data...) As I cannot see what's inside, I don't know where I can put app files (but not the whole app itself). Is there any way to drill into this and see what files reside in it for the apps that I moved using the pm command?
Approach 2:
I insert the USB. I don't run any sm commands. When I run the "df" or the "cat" commands, I see the USB mounted at "/storage/UUID" instead of being mounted at "/mnt/expand" and the format of the USB stays as VFAT. In this case, the UUID is 8 characters long instead of a GUID that I get in the previous approach. I can now drill into this mount point and see the structure and move app files to it. The problem is, the "pm move-package PACKAGE GUID" command fails with error of "-6". In the command, the GUID is the 8 character long string that I get at "/storage/UUID".
So, to summarize, with Approach 1, I can move apps but not app files. With Approach 2, I can move app files, but not the apps themselves. I am missing something and there must be a way to combine the approaches. Any help is appreciated.

Expand Internal Storage On 4K Firestick with a USB Drive | TechDoctorUK
www.techdoctoruk.com
You can move apps using the instructions.

Got it, I had to learn about portable and adopted storage. All good!

Related

[Q] Backup external SD contents to PC using ADB or similar

So, the interwebs has NOTHING that I can find which addresses this. Is there an ADB command or perhaps an app that will backup one's external SD to their PC?
You would just have to go into adb, debugging enabled, etc, and you'd basically just do adb pull /system/sdcard and it should dump it into your tools folder; though idk why you'd wana do that by adb exactly, though i know WHY, just...yea, lol.
Though if on the gs3, it'd be /system/sdcard1
Why not just connect with USB cable and transfer that way.
XDA Moderator
Papa Smurf151 said:
Why not just connect with USB cable and transfer that way.
XDA Moderator
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Because for some reason, whenever I try to bulk-load everything on the external card to my Windows PC, it just sits at "calculating" or whatever. It doesn't actually begin the transfer, nor does it "fail". I've found that if I do one folder at a time, I can get most of it, but not all of it.
I just got a 32gb card, I want to mirror the contents of my current 16gb card to it.
teh roxxorz said:
You would just have to go into adb, debugging enabled, etc, and you'd basically just do adb pull /system/sdcard and it should dump it into your tools folder; though idk why you'd wana do that by adb exactly, though i know WHY, just...yea, lol.
Though if on the gs3, it'd be /system/sdcard1
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've tried telling it to pull from the following (all valid locations for my particular setup):
- /mnt/external_sd
- /external_sd
- /mnt/sdcard1
Each returns the "remote object '' does not exist" error.
disturbd1 said:
I've tried telling it to pull from the following (all valid locations for my particular setup):
- /mnt/external_sd
- /external_sd
- /mnt/sdcard1
Each returns the "remote object '' does not exist" error.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, navigate to / on adb in the shell, do an ls command, list the directories, and paths, and use the path it shows up there; it could see it differently than what you see when you use the phone.

[GUIDE] Repair and format micro SD cards

I’ll try to keep this as short as possible. This instruction will be for Window OS, via command prompt.
This is for those of you who are just having whatever kind of issues with your Micro SD cards. Phone won’t detect it, it’s not showing the correct storage size by some huuuge amount (like a 64 GB card is only showing 27 or something….), etc etc… it won’t mount, anything. Also, it is important to understand a few basic things…
If you have a 64 GB card, it’s default file system should be exFAT. If you tried to format it with FAT32, that is likely the issue you are having with it not reading, or showing incorrect database size. If that is the case, you need to do a full format, and repair it per these instruction.
ANYWAYS... here. we. go.
1.Pop the micro SD card into some type of card adapter for either your USB, or you SD slot on your PC. A message window will pop up asking you what you want to do, etc etc… if you don’t want to pull anything off the card for backup purposes, then just close it.
2.Open a folder somewhere (like on your desktop for example). After you do this, you will see on the left side, a list under “computer” there will be “C:\” some others, etc etc… your SD card you popped in should be there as well. For this example, let’s say windows has called it “F:\”
3. Right click on F:\ … select “Format…”
4. Now it will give you some options here. It will tell you the file system type that the card is currently formatted to. Make sure “quick format” option is checked, and go ahead and format it.
5.After it is done, safely unmout the device by clicking the little USB icon (with the green check mark) on the bottom right of your screen (on your tool bar) and select the option to eject that particular storage device. Pop it back in your phone. If this solved your issue, stop here. If you are still having problems, continue reading.
6.Take the card out, and follow steps 1, 2, and 3 again.
7.This time will be a little different, and will take MUCH longer (depending on the size of your card). After you select format to bring up the format tool window. This time you are going to UNCHECK “quick format”. All cards that are 64 GB should be formatted to exFAT. 32 GB and below should be FAT32 or whatever the default was for your card. I am pretty sure the note II is supporting exFAT file systems native, now. So you should be good there.
8. Now after you have unchecked “quick format”, go ahead and proceed with the formatting. Leave everything else default.
Now the waiting game… this can take up to two hours… So find something to do, lol.
9.After it is done, follow step 5 of this procedure. Pop SD back into your phone. If this didn’t fix your issue, proceed to next step, if it did, stop reading.
10.For this next part, it will require command prompt work, and please pay close attention.
11.Go to your desktop, and on your desktop, create a file called “disk_repair.txt” this needs to be a text file. So when you right click on the desktop to create the file, select “new” and then select “text file”
12.Click your windows icon on the bottom left of your screen, and the “search programs and files” box, start to type “command prompt”… you will see it pop up at the top. When it does, RIGHT click on it, and select “run as administrator”… it might ask you for your windows password, it might not, I can’t remember, but self-explanatory what you should do if it does ask.
13. After you open command prompt, pop the micro SD card back into the computer. It might ask you to format it again, who knows, freaking windows ikr. If it does, just do the “quick format” option and it will go pretty quick and then you can continue with the next part.
14. So again, let’s assume the computer reads the storage device as F: and then let’s assume your windows user name is BATMAN (type whatever is relevant to you… if the storage device shows up as Z: or M: or WindowsSucks: then enter it accordingly into the command I am about to give you… but again… for argument’s sake… it is F: and you are “BATMAN”
15.So, how… do we killlllll…. Then batman???? Rofl jk…
16. type this command into your command prompt… exactly as it is, then hit enter.
Code:
chkdsk /F F: > "C:\Users\BATMAN\Desktop\disk_repair.txt"
17. After you do this, you will see an ouput. If everything is good, you will see something like this in the output:
Code:
The type of the file system is exFAT.
Volume Serial Number is 9CD4-E720
Windows is verifying files and folders...
File and folder verification is complete.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.
62364672 KB total disk space.
0 KB in 0 files.
128 KB in 1 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
256 KB in use by the system.
62364288 KB available on disk.
131072 bytes in each allocation unit.
487224 total allocation units on disk.
487221 allocation units available on disk.
18. If it is showing errors, or you are still having problems, go to your desktop, open up that little file you created, and your ouput will be written to it. Upload it here so we can look at it.
That should be thorough enough.
Can anybody verify that the stock kernel supports exFAT file systems? Or if any kernels do, which ones? That would be useful information to have in this thread. I just didn’t have time to go digging around for it. This took like 10 minutes to write up I was waiting for my food here at Togo’s. lol
Stock does and I believe persues kernel does as well. I haven't run a custom kernel in q while so I can't confirm that though
Sent from my SGH-T889 using xda app-developers app
i thought stock did as well, i just was not sure.

Need help unpackimg boot img

I checked around and I found some stuff for GS3 but nothing for ouya. I'm looking into checking out the boot image to make changes so my usb drive shows up as an sdcard. I've made some changes to init and vold files, but on reboot, the init gets replaced. I want to look at the boot image to see what I can change to enable something like this. Older version of the ouya firmware were having issues with usb drives not being mounted and the solution was to change the vold file to mount usbdrive in mnt/sdcard; which is what I want. Ouya devs heard our cries so secondary_storage in the other init file is listed for the mmc now and it labels usbdrive as external_Storage , to be mounted to mnt/usbdrive. I've got some games that don't save files to an external usbdrive and keeps looking for external storage that is NOT a usb drive; ie sdcard.
Namely the app I want is worms armageddon. I'm tired of using my fat thumbs to rope around. I want to try it out with the joystick.

[Q] Path Substitution Not Working

I picked up a USB flash drive to use for my Kodi thumbnails so I wouldn't keep running out of space on my Fire TV. I mounted the drive using stick mount, then added the code below to my advancedsettings.xml file, but I don't believe it's working. I'm assuming that when I pop the flash drive into my computer, I'd be able to see a bunch of thumbnail files on there, wouldn't I? But my thumb drive is blank. Below is the code I'm using. Am I missing something? Is my path in the TO line not specific enough? (I created an "xbmcthumbnails" folder on my flash drive.)
<pathsubstitution>
<substitute>
<from>/storage/emulated/0/Android/data/org.xbmc.kodi/files/.xbmc/userdata/Thumbnails/</from>
<to>/storage/usb/drive1/xbmcthumbnails/</to>
</substitute>
</pathsubstitution>
I don't think StickMount mounts USB drives as "drive1". It should be mounted at "sda" or "sdb"... You can use the "mount" command to see how your USB is mounted. Nothing to do with your issue, but StickMount worked correctly for me initially, but it never unmounted drives and wrongly showed mounted USBs when no USB was hooked to FTV. Plus, I could never mount USBs using volume names (instead of sda..) with StickMount. There is another app that worked very good for me, USB OTG Helper. Last I checked a while back, USB OTG app didn't do that either.
On a related note, the "from" tag can use Kodi special paths to identify locations within its install. You can modify your "from" tag to
<from>special://masterprofile/Thumbnails/</from>
This holds if you have not created any profiles in Kodi. If you have, check "special://profile". For reference, see http://kodi.wiki/view/Special_protocol
dbdoshi said:
I don't think StickMount mounts USB drives as "drive1". It should be mounted at "sda" or "sdb"... You can use the "mount" command to see how your USB is mounted. Nothing to do with your issue, but StickMount worked correctly for me initially, but it never unmounted drives and wrongly showed mounted USBs when no USB was hooked to FTV. Plus, I could never mount USBs using volume names (instead of sda..) with StickMount. There is another app that worked very good for me, USB OTG Helper. Last I checked a while back, USB OTG app didn't do that either.
On a related note, the "from" tag can use Kodi special paths to identify locations within its install. You can modify your "from" tag to
<from>special://masterprofile/Thumbnails/</from>
This holds if you have not created any profiles in Kodi. If you have, check "special://profile". For reference, see http://kodi.wiki/view/Special_protocol
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This will also work:
<advancedsettings>
<pathsubstitution>
<substitute>
<from>/storage/emulated/0/Android/data/org.xbmc.kodi/files/.kodi/userdata/Thumbnails/</from>
<to>/storage/emulated/0/usbstorage/sda1/kodithumbnails/</to>
</substitute>
</pathsubstitution>
</advancedsettings>
dbdoshi said:
I don't think StickMount mounts USB drives as "drive1". It should be mounted at "sda" or "sdb"... You can use the "mount" command to see how your USB is mounted.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
he is likely using Busymount
which does mount as drive 1, again nothing to do with his issue though
jmerrilljr2 said:
This will also work:
<advancedsettings>
<pathsubstitution>
<substitute>
<from>/storage/emulated/0/Android/data/org.xbmc.kodi/files/.kodi/userdata/Thumbnails/</from>
<to>/storage/emulated/0/usbstorage/sda1/kodithumbnails/</to>
</substitute>
</pathsubstitution>
</advancedsettings>
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This appears to have done the trick, thankyouverymuch! I've got a new folder on my thumb drive called kodithumbnails, which contains folders for every letter of the alphabet. So it looks like it's working.
The only snag is now movie cover art doesn't appear, just the text name and a blank space above it. Another gentleman on this forum told me that this was expected behavior, and that I'd need to go in and delete a file from my Fire TV in order to bring the movie covers back, but I was not successful in finding the file (using ES File Explorer) anywhere on my Fire TV. I was looking for a file called "textures13db." Might that have changed with the update to Kodi? Or how else might I go about bringing back the cover art?
From within kodi itself
Raymondo17 said:
This appears to have done the trick, thankyouverymuch! I've got a new folder on my thumb drive called kodithumbnails, which contains folders for every letter of the alphabet. So it looks like it's working.
The only snag is now movie cover art doesn't appear, just the text name and a blank space above it. Another gentleman on this forum told me that this was expected behavior, and that I'd need to go in and delete a file from my Fire TV in order to bring the movie covers back, but I was not successful in finding the file (using ES File Explorer) anywhere on my Fire TV. I was looking for a file called "textures13db." Might that have changed with the update to Kodi? Or how else might I go about bringing back the cover art?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You need to go to in Lodi itself settings/file manager/database/ highlight textures13.db and press c if using a keyboard or long press on your remote to bring up the context menu then press delete

Moving apps to USB storage and Official Updates, best way to do it?

Hi everyone,
On my 4k firestick and my firetv 3rd gen (dongle) I’m using an otg cable, and an external usb drive formatted using ADB partition command. In order to move the apps from the internal to external storage I either use de ADB move command or the MiXplorer, the downside on using the MiXplorer is that you have to copy the app to the downloader folder, uninstall it and then reinstall it from the folder and it goes straight to the usb partition, but this method looses al the login info, not a major drawback but nerveless a nuisance.
When it comes to update the apps from amazon’s official appstore we run in to an error if the app is located in the external drive, so the solution is either move it back to the internal storage, update it and move it back either by uninstalling it and downloading it again from the Appstore, moving with ADB command, or using the downloader app to find the newest version and install it over the old one, although this last method works it is prone to errors due to choosing the wrong apk version listed on those alternative sources (apkmirror and others).
So, my question is if there is an app with a graphic interface like MiXplorere that allows to move the apps to and from the USB storage in a similar way as the ADB command line? Is there a different method that I’m missing?
Thanks in advance,
London
london18 said:
Hi everyone,
On my 4k firestick and my firetv 3rd gen (dongle) I’m using an otg cable, and an external usb drive formatted using ADB partition command. In order to move the apps from the internal to external storage I either use de ADB move command or the MiXplorer, the downside on using the MiXplorer is that you have to copy the app to the downloader folder, uninstall it and then reinstall it from the folder and it goes straight to the usb partition, but this method looses al the login info, not a major drawback but nerveless a nuisance.
When it comes to update the apps from amazon’s official appstore we run in to an error if the app is located in the external drive, so the solution is either move it back to the internal storage, update it and move it back either by uninstalling it and downloading it again from the Appstore, moving with ADB command, or using the downloader app to find the newest version and install it over the old one, although this last method works it is prone to errors due to choosing the wrong apk version listed on those alternative sources (apkmirror and others).
So, my question is if there is an app with a graphic interface like MiXplorere that allows to move the apps to and from the USB storage in a similar way as the ADB command line? Is there a different method that I’m missing?
Thanks in advance,
London
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hey,
Not sure if you've tried apps2sd Pro?
To use this this app you will have to set partitions on the extsdcard USB first.
If I remember correctly one partition is made ext4 and one FAT32.
The ext4 partition becomes apps adopted storage when mounted and the FAT32 partition becomes normal storage for downloads etc.
Hope this helps
Regards
Unfortunately, Apps2sd Pro only works in rooted devices, not the case here.
Any how thanks for the suggestion, let's if there is some other solution in this line.
Cheers,
London
london18 said:
Unfortunately, Apps2sd Pro only works in rooted devices, not the case here.
Any how thanks for the suggestion, let's if there is some other solution in this line.
Cheers,
London
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi,
Apologies I guess I just assumed you were rooted as most on here use rooted devices.
The only other (known) way is described here :
How To Increase Storage On Firestick & Fire TV in 2022
This post will explain how to Increase Storage on Firestick & Fire TVs. The Amazon Firestick is the most popular streaming device available on the
troypoint.com
Apart from that I know of no other way to use adopted storage on fireos without root.
Regards
Bertonumber1 said:
Hi,
Apologies I guess I just assumed you were rooted as most on here use rooted devices.
The only other (known) way is described here :
How To Increase Storage On Firestick & Fire TV in 2022
This post will explain how to Increase Storage on Firestick & Fire TVs. The Amazon Firestick is the most popular streaming device available on the
troypoint.com
Apart from that I know of no other way to use adopted storage on fireos without root.
Regards
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is basically the procedure that I used to format the USB drive, but to move the apps he suggests to use ES file explorer, that was banned due to security concerns, so I was looking for an alternative...
Thanks again for the patience and attention.
London

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