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Hello
I'm posting this because I just changed my 1GB SD card for a 16 GB Class 6, everything works fine, but now (one of the goals of the operation) I want to upgrade to 6.0 Cyanogen
So, the question is: should I partition? what is the reasonable amount to allocate to keep the rest for any Debian etc.
Depend...
OK, I have the answer, so I give it in case you wonder.
In fact, there is no need to partition the point of view of 6.0, but some applications can seek an ext2 or swap (this is a constraint due to these applications, not to cyanogen) So if we can predict all at once as long as it does not take too much space (32 MB of swap, and around 800 / 1.2GB ext2 ...).
Still, I think there are people who program with their feet ...
Correct you don't need the EXT partition because Froyo supports apps2fat which means you can do it with a regularly partitioned card. However, if your going to install apps to your SD its better to flash fireats script that lets you use the EXT partition and go that route. Reason being, if you ever unmount your SD card with the system on, all your apps go with it.
Sent from my HTC Magic using XDA App
I found this post in some other section!!
i am just giving the same information here for my fellow g3 mates!!
Full credit go to neoKushan
here the original thread!! http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=742351
Nows here what we are here for!!! Clear your doubts guys!!!
Ok, so here's the deal, in a very longwinded way that should hopefully explain everything and answer ALL questions.
You have an SD card in your phone and, a bit like normal PC Hard Drives, you can "partition" them (split them into two or more sections of different filesystems). Normally, your SD card is just one big FAT32 partition, which is fine for storing your pics, messages, emails, etc.
Now, other then your Phone's SD card, your phone will have its own internal flash memory (or "NAND") storage. Tradditionally with Android, you could only install applications to this NAND storage, you cannot install them onto your SD card. So if you have an empty 32GB SD card, but only 5Mb of internal phone storage, you still wont be able to install many apps, if any at all.
This was done to protect the apps from things like piracy - it's not easy to access the location where apps are installed on your phone's internal storage (normally impossible without root), so you can't for example buy an app, copy it, refund it, then install it again.
Still, this is no good for those of us who like to install lots and lots of apps, legitimately, as we run out of internal storage very quickly.
So Google came up with a way to install apps to the SD card. A folder is created called something like .android_secure and this stores (I believe) encrypted versions of applications, but there's a few catches:
1) Apps aren't automatically stored here, you have to manually "move" them
2) Not all apps are capable of being moved, in fact most apps aren't, the developer needs to update their app and allow it. Some apps aren't and wont be updated and some developers may not want to allow it for whatever reason.
3) Not all app data is moved, most of it is but some data is left on your phone so many people still run out of internal storage quickly.
4) You can force ALL apps to be moved to this area by default, but it breaks incompatible ones - such as Widgets, which are unable to load due to the SD card not being "prepared".
So that's Froyo's version. Before Froyo existed, some very clever people came up with a thing called "Apps2SD". Remember I said that your SD card normally is one big FAT32 partition? Well, Apps2SD works by having your SD card patitioned into TWO filesystems. A normal FAT32 partition for your usual stuff and a secondary "EXT" partition. EXT is just a filesystem, like FAT32 or NTFS, but it's the filesystem used by Android internally. The SD card is normally FAT32 because it's a "universal" filesystem, that just about any machine will be able to read, whereas EXT filesystems are generally Linux only, but I digress.
EXT has several different versions. The most common one you'll see is ext3. The main difference between ext2 and ext3 is "journaling", which is just a fancy way of saying that should an operation (such as copying, writing or reading) be interrupted unexpectedly (say, by you turning your phone off), then no data should be lost or corrupted. You know how when you turn your phone on, it says "preparing SD card"? It takes a few minutes, but what it's actually doing is checking that the FAT32 partition hasn't been damaged, because FAT does NOT have journaling. If you used a computer back in the Windows 98 days, you may remember that lovely blue "Scandisk" screen that had to run every time you didn't shut your computer down correctly - that's the same thing. But then Windows 2000/XP came along with NTFS, which also has journaling, meaning you had less chance of loosing data. But I digress once more.
So you have your SD card partitioned into EXT and FAT32. Generally it doesn't matter if it's ext3 or ext4, but you don't get any real advantage with ext4 over ext3 in this instance. Apps2SD then runs a special script on your phone which "symbolically links" the folder from your phone's internal storage where your apps are normally stored, to the ext partition on your SD card. A symbolic link is a bit like a shortcut for folders, except it's transparent to the OS: In other words, Android doesn't know that when it's installing it's apps to the internal phone storage, it's actually being stored on the SD card. This effectively boosts your internal phone memory from the previous 5mb that you had in my example above, up to whatever size you made the ext partition on your SD card (often 512Mb or 1Gb, but it depends on how many apps you install).
Plus, because it's "journaled", it doesn't need to be "prepared", meaning it's ready to go as soon as the phone starts - so your widgets and apps work immediately (unlike "forced" Froyo Apps2SD, where widgets disappear).
The catch with Apps2SD is that whatever space the ext partition takes up is taken away from the SD card. So if you have a 4Gb card (with something like 3.5Gb of actual storage) and you make a 512Mb ext partition, your SD card will "shrink" to 3Gb. The space isn't actually lost, it's just being used by the ext partition. If you reformat your card, you'll get it back.
Finally, there's a difference between "Apps2SD" and "Apps2SD+". Remember I said that your apps are stored on a special folder inside your Phone's NAND storage? Well, that was a bit of a lie. It's actually stored in TWO places. There's a second area which is called the Davlik Cache. You don't really need to worry about what this is for (Hint: IT's to do with the Java runetime your phone uses to run apps), all you need to know is that apps use it to store data, which also eats up internal phone memory. Apps2SD+ moves davlik cache to the ext partition on your SD card as well, freeing up even more space. Some people believe that this may come at the cost of performance, as the internal NAND memory should be faster than your SD card (Which is why you also get people arguing over which "class" SD card is better for Apps2SD - the logic being that a faster SD card means less impact from this move), but the truth of the matter is that your applications will be running from your Phone's RAM anyway, so performance isn't really impacted at all. Since most apps are only a few hundred Kb's in size, or a couple of MB at the most, it's a non-issue.
Finally, any recent version of Apps2SD/Apps2SD+ should work with an SD card that is or isn't formatted with an ext partition. It'll check for this partition when your phone first boots and if it's not there, just use internal phone storage.
Having an ext partition WITHOUT Apps2SD+ shouldn't cause any issues, either, so you can format your SD card whenever you're ready.
So in summary:
Apps2SD "fakes" your phone's internal memory and puts it all on a hidden section of your SD card.
Apps2SD+ pushes even more content to the SD card, freeing up even more space on the phone itself.
"Froyo" Apps2SD has various limitations that "old" apps2SD does not, but is much easier to handle as it doesn't involve any kind of "partitioning".
I don't really claim to be an expert but I wrote this and nobody really chimed in to say anything was wrong, so hopefully it applies here.
I'll try to keep an eye on this thread in case anyone has questions.
I don't really claim to be an expert but I wrote this and nobody really chimed in to say anything was wrong, so hopefully it applies here.
I'll try to keep an eye on this thread in case anyone has questions.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks a lot buddy.. People may know all that but you have written in such a simple manner that even a small kid will understand..
Acid lestitious 2.0. Fugumod 2.2 build 1.9
thanx soo muxh for this info...it's getting really confusing out there with everyone claiming this type is better than that blah blah blah etcetc....this is very helpful
thanks again
JohnstonF said:
thanx soo muxh for this info...it's getting really confusing out there with everyone claiming this type is better than that blah blah blah etcetc....this is very helpful
thanks again
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You're welcome
Acid lestitious 2.0. Fugumod 2.2
okay, so i just flashed Kyrillos' ROM (7.0, then upgraded to 7.1)
now i want to partition my SD card to create SWAP, and also to create a partition to add extra space to the internal memory (what is it's name, again?)
i don't know too much about what type of partition to do, so can you guide me through the process or give me a link where i can read further?
also, what are the recommended partition sizes?
PS : i have a 4GB, class 4 SD card. and i just downloaded minitool.
Mohit12 said:
okay, so i just flashed Kyrillos' ROM (7.0, then upgraded to 7.1)
now i want to partition my SD card to create SWAP, and also to create a partition to add extra space to the internal memory (what is it's name, again?)
i don't know too much about what type of partition to do, so can you guide me through the process or give me a link where i can read further?
also, what are the recommended partition sizes?
PS : i have a 4GB, class 4 SD card. and i just downloaded minitool.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
you can flash g3mod kernel and do partition in uer sd card.mine is 8 GB Card, Class 4...I have 1024 as Ext Size and 256 as SWAP. so the choice is uers.
Mohit12 said:
okay, so i just flashed Kyrillos' ROM (7.0, then upgraded to 7.1)
now i want to partition my SD card to create SWAP, and also to create a partition to add extra space to the internal memory (what is it's name, again?)
i don't know too much about what type of partition to do, so can you guide me through the process or give me a link where i can read further?
also, what are the recommended partition sizes?
PS : i have a 4GB, class 4 SD card. and i just downloaded minitool.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, the answer to that is already in the forum
http://forum.xda-developers.com/wiki/index.php?title=SD_card_partitioning
Hope this helps
darksyde18 said:
Well, the answer to that is already in the forum
http://forum.xda-developers.com/wiki/index.php?title=SD_card_partitioning
Hope this helps
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Click to collapse
I've been looking for that too , Thanks
okay, i didn't know i'd need a card reader :/
i don't have it. any way to partition it using the CWM?
and what sizes do you recommend? i was thinking maybe 128 MB SWAP and 512 as the internal memory size.
and do i have to flash the g3mod kernel? i'm currently running 2.6.32.9. this came with Kyrillos' 7.0.
wait, i'm getting confused now. when i flash Kryillos' ROM 7.0, does my kernel also get changed? or am i running the stock kernel?
and the CWM i'm talking about is just.. recovery. the one that i access using vol up + vol down + home key + power key.
that also has partition SD card option under advanced > partition SD card.
will this do or do i have to flash g3mod kernel?
Once you flash Kryillos' ROM you are no longer running the stock kernel
CWM is ClockWorkMod Recovery and it comes with the ROM and so it's different (Google it)
And about making a SWAP, well , you might wanna read this -
"1. An Android swap partition must live on your SD card. SD cards are very, very slow memory. They are 100 to 1000x slower than a SIM. They are 10 to 100x slower than a hard drive. They are marginally faster than a network connection. When an application is “swapped out” it is copied into this very slow memory, and copied back to physical memory when it needs to run. On the other hand, when an app needs to be restarted after being terminated by Android, it is loaded not from the SD card but from the device’s (relatively) fast physical memory.
2. When an Android app is terminated because of low memory, it decides what information must be persisted to represent it’s state. This can be very, very small. For example, it might be an integer index into a database. When an app is moved into virtual memory, the OS has no idea what’s important. It just moves the application in whole. It can’t be smart about it.
3. Having swap actually prevents the native Android memory management scheme from activating. The system sees memory and doesn’t distinguish between physical and virtual. It will therefore prefer swap over the native Android memory management scheme, and won’t activate the native scheme until swap is full.
4. Having swap requires some overhead of system resources."
darksyde18 said:
Once you flash Kryillos' ROM you are no longer running the stock kernel
CWM is ClockWorkMod Recovery and it comes with the ROM and so it's different (Google it)
And about making a SWAP, well , you might wanna read this -
"1. An Android swap partition must live on your SD card. SD cards are very, very slow memory. They are 100 to 1000x slower than a SIM. They are 10 to 100x slower than a hard drive. They are marginally faster than a network connection. When an application is “swapped out” it is copied into this very slow memory, and copied back to physical memory when it needs to run. On the other hand, when an app needs to be restarted after being terminated by Android, it is loaded not from the SD card but from the device’s (relatively) fast physical memory.
2. When an Android app is terminated because of low memory, it decides what information must be persisted to represent it’s state. This can be very, very small. For example, it might be an integer index into a database. When an app is moved into virtual memory, the OS has no idea what’s important. It just moves the application in whole. It can’t be smart about it.
3. Having swap actually prevents the native Android memory management scheme from activating. The system sees memory and doesn’t distinguish between physical and virtual. It will therefore prefer swap over the native Android memory management scheme, and won’t activate the native scheme until swap is full.
4. Having swap requires some overhead of system resources."
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Nice and informative.
Hello all,
I have CM9 nightly installed on a 32GB microSD and I have just run into a weird problem. I still have 27GB left open BUT when I try to download magazines and install apps, it's saying I'm out of room or running out of room. Anyone have any idea why that might be?
Is it possible it's installing things to the EMMC? If so, how do I change that?
Sorry if this a n00b question. Thanks in advance for your help.
mikelav456 said:
Hello all,
I have CM9 nightly installed on a 32GB microSD and I have just run into a weird problem. I still have 27GB left open BUT when I try to download magazines and install apps, it's saying I'm out of room or running out of room. Anyone have any idea why that might be?
Is it possible it's installing things to the EMMC? If so, how do I change that?
Sorry if this a n00b question. Thanks in advance for your help.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Android has 3 major areas where stuff is stored. The system partition holds all the OS stuff plus has an area for system apps. The data partition is were downloaded apps get stored normally. The media or sdcard area is normally used for music, videos, pictures and also where some apps store any working data.
The system and data areas are of relatively fixed sizes even though they are all on the actual SD card. For your 32GB SD card it is probably "460M system, 975M data, rest is FAT for sdcard" from veryGreen post.
So your error message is being triggered probably because the 975M data partition is full. Typically this enough to hold about 150 - 200 apps depending on their size, but some games can take quite a lot.
You can check memory usage by going into settings and looking under apps.
What can you do about it? On an SD card install the simplest way is to use ANdroids capability to move apps from the standard data partition to the sdcard partition. Not all apps can be moved but many can and this will then free up space in your data partition.
Get the Apps2Sd app to help you manage this process.
I haven't run from a sdcard in quitevawhile, buy it sounds like the card didn't get repartitioned after making it into a bootable. After you burn an image to a card, you need to use an application like Easus, a disk partitioning tool (free for home use for windows, I believe) t repartition the card and make use if the remaining space.
mateorod said:
I haven't run from a sdcard in quitevawhile, buy it sounds like the card didn't get repartitioned after making it into a bootable. After you burn an image to a card, you need to use an application like Easus, a disk partitioning tool (free for home use for windows, I believe) t repartition the card and make use if the remaining space.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think the partitioning must have worked otherwise it wouldn't function at all.
You could change data partition size to give more space to the data partition if you are careful. I've done that on emmc prior to install. I've never tried it on an SD card after install and it's possible it might muck something else up. However, the basic point is that apps and related content go into data by default. The big part of the SD card left over from the initial install is intended for media.
Compare it to a phone. The data partition in the internal phone memory is fixed and can run out of space if lots of apps are installed. If you plug an SD expansion card into a phone it allows you to store lots music, video, etc but unless you move apps to the SD card then your original data space is unchanged. That's why app users can complain if a memory hungry app can't be moved to SD.
Maybe you can teach me something here. I am not sure I understand.
When I formatted an 8 gig card to run cm7.1, I was able to use it to boot but had the rest of memory unavailable for use. It wasn't until I redid the process and then reformatted the partitions to have the remaining space available. Only then was I able to use the remaining 6 gigabyte or whatever. I had the four partitions in both instances, and the card worked, it just wasn't available because all the space was allocated to the wrong partition. Which I rectified with Easus, I'm pretty sure.
What I guess I am saying, isbthat there are some tools that could be used, although I maybe wrong. It just seems counter-intuitive that the OP should have to use App2SD and otherworkarounds when theybhave 32 gigs to play with. I think Easus lets you define those partitions anyway you like, with the 29 gigs or so that is left once you allocate the system stuff.
Like I sad, I maybe just don't understand this very well, it is something I did when I was first learning about rooting, before I figured there was no real reason not to go internal.
mateorod said:
Maybe you can teach me something here. I am not sure I understand.
When I formatted an 8 gig card to run cm7.1, I was able to use it to boot but had the rest of memory unavailable for use. It wasn't until I redid the process and then reformatted the partitions to have the remaining space available. Only then was I able to use the remaining 6 gigabyte or whatever. I had the four partitions in both instances, and the card worked, it just wasn't available because all the space was allocated to the wrong partition. Which I rectified with Easus, I'm pretty sure.
What I guess I am saying, isbthat there are some tools that could be used, although I maybe wrong. It just seems counter-intuitive that the OP should have to use App2SD and otherworkarounds when theybhave 32 gigs to play with. I think Easus lets you define those partitions anyway you like, with the 29 gigs or so that is left once you allocate the system stuff.
Like I sad, I maybe just don't understand this very well, it is something I did when I was first learning about rooting, before I figured there was no real reason not to go internal.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The various partitions have different purposes. It's not that they are unavailable for use. You want each area to have sufficient room for what you want but not necessarily too big because that then is wasted and is subtracting from the other areas.
First there is the boot partition containing the boot images. This can be small.
Next you have the system partition (~500MB) which can be fairly small because the OS does not take a lot of room and the system apps are relatively fixed in size and you don't need to add extra to that.
Next you have the data partition where downloaded apps and some of their associated data lives. You want this to be fairly big to accommodate a decent number of apps but it doesn't need to be huge. Apps vary in size from 100s of Kbytes up to say 20MB or more. So a 1GB data partition can typically hold about 200 apps.
On an SD card that then leaves the rest of space for a sdcard partition where media can be stored like video, pictures and music plus some apps will also require some working space on there.
So on an SD card install the main balance is between data and sdcard. If you were to make the data partition larger to accommodate more downloaded apps then you reduce the amount of space for music, video etc. But you do want enough space to hold a decent number of apps. The standard verygreen SD card installer sets the balance at ~1GB data and the rest sdcard for media. Now if you never wanted to put much media files on the SD card and you want to be able to download thousands of apps then that would be an argument for setting the balance the other way.
Now if you install to the internal memory the same scenario applies but you have an additional partition confusingly called emmc. Your boot, system and data areas are on the internal memory. The left over internal area is the emmc partition and the sd card is now normally set up to be a single sdcard partition.
Both the emmc and the sd card are typically used to hold media files.
The size of the data and emmc partition in the internal memory can be varied before you do the install by some partitoning zip tools and there is a thread dedicated to that.
By default as supplied new Nooks have a 5GB internal data partition and a 1GB emmc. Many people think that is not a great choice as it is really difficult to run out of app space with 5GB and it means there is only 1GB internal space for media and the unused data space is wasted. By repartitoning to say 2GB data and 4GB emmc then you get plenty of space for apps and release space for more media.
You are right that using something like Apps2Sd would seem unnecessary when you have lots of free space. It is effectively a work-around to let you use some of the sdcard as extra data area if you run out of the data area that has been allocated. Actually on an SD card install there is not much of a downside in that moving an app from data to sdcard as it is still all on the same SD card. For an internal memory install it is nice to have a big enough data partiton to make moving apps to the SD card unnecessary.
I've just installed the Paranoid-Jellybean 1.99
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1793180
on my EU HTC HD2
I can't anderstand what sd the idea behind program S2E, it seems its purpose is to move apps to SD but when used it this way then all newly installed Widgets disappeared What's more even without launching S2E in Settings thare are options to move individual apps to SD (not for all in fact)
it isn't talking about the normal fat partition on the sd card, you must have an EXT partition created before using the app.
What it does, is take the ext partition on the sd card and makes the system think that it is internal memory, thus giving you more 'internal' memory for apps and data and such like.
This isn't the same as choosing 'move to sd ' in the settings - apps options, as this moves the app to the FAT (windows) partition of the sd card. Some apps wont work when 'moved to sd', however they WILL work from the ext partition, because android thinks its internal.
So, if you haven't already got an ext partition, back up the contents of your current sd card (it will get wiped) then reboot into cwm, choose 'advanced - partition sd card' and choose a partition size. (512 or 1024 is usually plenty) then restart android and try the app again.
Any apps that you have already 'moved to sd', go move them back to internal, and the system should automatically move them from the FAT partition to the EXT partition.
Tahnk you for your explanation. Also I must apologize I confused the names of the programs - in fact its S2E rather than A2S (the previous post have written from memory). However probabely this s2e serves the same purpose, as it has such relevant commands:
Applications - Location: /data/app
Private apps - Location: /data/app-private
...
and so on, until:
Dalvik cache - Moving from /data to /sd-ext
So, I've chosen the first option and got displayed:
Application
Moving from /data to /sd-ext
Reboot is required!
and rebooted the phone, but the result was disappointing - several apps dissappeared including all Widgets!
Of course I've had ext3 partition previously set.
What was wrong?
Other question please: exactly WHAT is worth moving to SD Ext partition, Dalvik cache too?
yea they do the same/similar things - namely move parts of the system to the ext partition, and create symbolic links so that the system doesnt notice they've moved.
You seem to be moving your entire data folder to the ext, which i believe has an impact on boot performance, since the data partition wont be mounted straight away, and android needs it during boot.
I don't know a great deal about the various app2sd scripts, but the ones i've used normally only move the /data/app/ (your user installed apps folder) and the dalvik cache to the sd-ext partition.
samsamuel said:
yea they do the same/similar things - namely move parts of the system to the ext partition, and create symbolic links so that the system doesnt notice they've moved.
You seem to be moving your entire data folder to the ext, which i believe has an impact on boot performance, since the data partition wont be mounted straight away, and android needs it during boot.
I don't know a great deal about the various app2sd scripts, but the ones i've used normally only move the /data/app/ (your user installed apps folder) and the dalvik cache to the sd-ext partition.
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Click to collapse
So won't it exert excessive load on SD card which could lead to some sort of instability or other issues?
ioy said:
So won't it exert excessive load on SD card which could lead to some sort of instability or other issues?
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Click to collapse
better than exerting load on the nand and increasing the chances of bad blocks, right?
samsamuel said:
better than exerting load on the nand and increasing the chances of bad blocks, right?
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Click to collapse
theoretically YES but then does it also apply for the whole Android ROM itself (please compare the neighbouring discussion "is NAND Android better than SD and why?")
ioy said:
(please compare
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Click to collapse
no thanks, i have far more interesting things to do. i couldn't care less if there's excess load, though i'm pretty sure there isn't, since i've been running an ext partition for several months and no problems.
Have you understood me well? I've asked about the problem probably NAND ROMs themselves wear NAND memory too so would it be safer (for the device) to use SD ROMs (which write only on SD memory all the time)? How do you think, could it be the case?
i think if it were of any real benefit, people would be talking about it, but no one does. I guess its down to you, if YOU think it will help, then do it. If you don't, don't!
I guess battery drain would be teh real deal maker/breaker. I havent used sd android, but i believe it to be (in general terms) a little less stable, more prone to slowdowns, and harder on teh battery. But thats all anecdotal evidence, as i said, ive never booted sd android.
(edit - i must say, in humour, not meaning offence, that between this thread and your other thread, you sound like a guy who just bought a sports car and wants to cycle to work to save wear and tear on teh car )