Database Users

Folder structure

I am trying to understand the folder structure on the TF.
I have a 16GB micros SD card and I want all data type files to be saved there e.g. photos, downloads, music etc.
There is a folder at the top level called /SDCARD and I had assumed that this was the MicroSD card and all this sort of data is being stored in sub folder from there.
I have now realised that the MicroSD card is actually accessed from /Removable/MicroSD and that the TF has not stored anything on it. I have just moved my music and video to there.
Can I move all the other SDCARD subfolders to /Removable/MicroSD and then delete the SDCARD folder?
I can't see the point of having a folder called SDCARD it is very misleading.
Thanks for any help.

This is your internal storage. I'm not sure why it is displayed this way, maybe that will become standard in Gingerbread?

You cannot 'delete' the SDCARD folder. It is a mount point for the remainder of your internal storage (16GB or 32GB)
As bizarre as it seems when compared to a phone, this actually makes more sense. My Droid X has 6.5GB of the 8GB internal memory put aside for the /data partition. Despite having the phone for a full year and having a ton of apps installed, /data still has 5GB free. That's 5GB of storage I do not have access to, so it's effectively wasted.
On the ASUS (and others HC tabs?) that space exists as a virtual device /dev/fuse and is mounted as /mnt/sdcard. A symbolic link exists /sdcard which points to the mount point. The net result is, you have the majority of free space on the internal memory available to you. If you didn't, there'd be no incentive to buy the 32GB version over the 16GB version.
It is called /sdcard to maintain the illusion within the OS. This space, like it or not, is your primary storage. It makes your actual sdcard more of a transient storage location, great for just music, movies, etc., that you do not necessarily want to keep on the device long term. This is a great advantage as you can keep multiple sdcards with different content and not worry about messing up the core OS storage needs.
Be aware that the OS and apps expect to find certain data in /sdcard and moving the folders to your 'external' card will only force these apps and processes to recreate the folders in /sdcard. Also some apps will have lost some of their data and may not operate as expected or will act as when they were first installed (games will redownload supporting data, for example)
Sent from my rooted ASUS Transformer running PRIME 1.4

jhanford said:
You cannot 'delete' the SDCARD folder. It is a mount point for the remainder of your internal storage (16GB or 32GB)
As bizarre as it seems when compared to a phone, this actually makes more sense. My Droid X has 6.5GB of the 8GB internal memory put aside for the /data partition. Despite having the phone for a full year and having a ton of apps installed, /data still has 5GB free. That's 5GB of storage I do not have access to, so it's effectively wasted.
On the ASUS (and others HC tabs?) that space exists as a virtual device /dev/fuse and is mounted as /mnt/sdcard. A symbolic link exists /sdcard which points to the mount point. The net result is, you have the majority of free space on the internal memory available to you. If you didn't, there'd be no incentive to buy the 32GB version over the 16GB version.
It is called /sdcard to maintain the illusion within the OS. This space, like it or not, is your primary storage. It makes your actual sdcard more of a transient storage location, great for just music, movies, etc., that you do not necessarily want to keep on the device long term. This is a great advantage as you can keep multiple sdcards with different content and not worry about messing up the core OS storage needs.
Be aware that the OS and apps expect to find certain data in /sdcard and moving the folders to your 'external' card will only force these apps and processes to recreate the folders in /sdcard. Also some apps will have lost some of their data and may not operate as expected or will act as when they were first installed (games will redownload supporting data, for example)
Sent from my rooted ASUS Transformer running PRIME 1.4
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
After reading your explanation, it makes better sense to me. I was a bit annoyed, but I see how this could work to my favor. Using just the actual SD cards for movies, music, ect.

Moving data - Video
Sorry, I find what is said here a little disconcerting.
Why have SD cards and USB devices attached (eg. USB Flash drives, hard drives) when the data flow only goes one way, "in", and not out.
If I want to edit a video, the files are too large to email.
I can't find a way to move the video to an external device.
All one can do, as far as I can tell, is to upload the unedited video to YouTube.
Once there initially one get an error message saying that the file type is not recognized. It is...eventually, but only after it's fully processed. This is really confusing to the user. You'd think Google would give Android users a processing message rather than something that makes you think there is no way to view and share your video other than your tablet.
I couldn't find a way to tag a video either.
The default seemed to be "entertainment."
The options for sharing video are much to limited.
The only site you can upload a video to is YouTube.
I'd love to be able to put it on another site (e.g. a personal/corporate website).
I sure wish there were a way of off-loading and storing a folder generated from the Tablet to an external device, especially one with external ports like the Transformer.
If anyone knows of an app to do two way data flows, I'd sure like to know about it because my SHDC card and USB Flash drives look so lonely with nothing to do.

[email protected] said:
Sorry, I find what is said here a little disconcerting.
Why have SD cards and USB devices attached (eg. USB Flash drives, hard drives) when the data flow only goes one way, "in", and not out.
If I want to edit a video, the files are too large to email.
I can't find a way to move the video to an external device.
All one can do, as far as I can tell, is to upload the unedited video to YouTube.
Once there initially one get an error message saying that the file type is not recognized. It is...eventually, but only after it's fully processed. This is really confusing to the user. You'd think Google would give Android users a processing message rather than something that makes you think there is no way to view and share your video other than your tablet.
I couldn't find a way to tag a video either.
The default seemed to be "entertainment."
The options for sharing video are much to limited.
The only site you can upload a video to is YouTube.
I'd love to be able to put it on another site (e.g. a personal/corporate website).
I sure wish there were a way of off-loading and storing a folder generated from the Tablet to an external device, especially one with external ports like the Transformer.
If anyone knows of an app to do two way data flows, I'd sure like to know about it because my SHDC card and USB Flash drives look so lonely with nothing to do.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
There is nothing stopping you from copy files from the internal storage to an external sdcard. From the built-in file manager you can select a folder using the check boxes to the left of it, and then click the Copy or Cut button at the top of the screen, then navigate up until you see "Removable". Tap that and then "MicroSD" and then you can tap "Paste" at the top of the screen to copy or move to the new location.
Sent from my Transformer TF101 using XDA Premium App

Drive letters or some kind of unique ID from the root would be favorable. I know it's meant to adapt to Android, but last time I checked, Honeycomb was a separat version of the OS. It's unfortunate that it has to fool both the user and itself to be effective.

moo99 said:
Drive letters or some kind of unique ID from the root would be favorable. I know it's meant to adapt to Android, but last time I checked, Honeycomb was a separat version of the OS. It's unfortunate that it has to fool both the user and itself to be effective.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It still maintains the overall Adroid/Linux filesystem structure, there are no lettered drives in *NIX.

I know that, bru. Calling it , I dont know, "Internal" instead of "SD Card" would make a little sense considering there are two separate ports for SD Cards on there. Writing an alias isnt that complicated

sdcard function on 3.2

I picked up a xoom wifi 10.1 recently, and first thing out of the box when it had net access was grab the 3.2 update. This was great as far as I could tell and so far the tablet has been excellent.
I ran into a sort-of glitch though. Although the apps I have on it function just fine for the most part, a couple of them (connectbot in this case) won't read from the /sdcard or /mnt/sdcard paths when trying to import a key file.
This is significant because those two locations aren't actually any sort of SD card - they are internal memory (which apparently connectbot can tell), and when I added an SD card it got put up under /mnt/external1 and never gets used by the system or applications.
So how do I transition from having the xoom's internal 32gb NOT be on the /sdcard path and make it so that my sdcard gets used properly? I haven't had it long enough to really build up any critical amount of data worth keeping, so if it takes a factory reset to do it then so be it. I was just hoping for a more graceful/less-destructive way to do it.
TIA

Not sure how this would work Stock.
I ordered an SD Card for mine so will have to wait for it to get in. Personally, I have no issues using the internal 32GB "SD" as primary since I would only want the add-on SD Card to be a backup location for things I don't want to lose.
I'll mess with it when an SD Card comes in and see if I can help.

I'm going to submit a bug report to connectbot, maybe it's their issue (aka - not quite fully functional on honeycomb) and not the xoom's. I'd still appreciate anybody's input on this though.

App developers are going to have to fix the compatability for their own apps.

tigerknight said:
I'm going to submit a bug report to connectbot, maybe it's their issue (aka - not quite fully functional on honeycomb) and not the xoom's. I'd still appreciate anybody's input on this though.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
From what I've read its read only through the Xoom. Write access only works when connected to your computer. From my experience that seems to be exactly what it is. Why is it read only is my question? Better than nothing and if I find its annoying I will root and use Tiamat for full access.
I think the guy who mentioned the path is onto something though. The internal storage is "sdcard" which made sense when there wasn't one. Now that there is, it would seem that the path needs to be changed somehow. Wonder why that wasnt modified with the 3.2 update? Maybe because there would be no way to copy the data if the path was changed and it would break all of the current programs? That would make sense to me?
We wouldn't mind some simple instructions to move the data after the path is changed, but for the mass market its probably not a viable option.
These are just my thoughts as I drink my morning coffee.
Sent from my Xoom using XDA Premium App

Should I be using Ext4?

ive been seeing this... I know its a filesystem for linux, which is something similar to NTFS and FAT for windows..
Question is should i be using this? benefits? does it work for all roms?

I thanked you because I've been meaning to ask this question for about a week now. I've noticed several roms here also make use of the Ext4 system and wondered about what type of advantages were offered.
Considering you noted it was a linux file system, I'd imagine there would be some speed increase associated with it but again, I have no clue when it comes to this. If it wasn't for you, I wouldn't even know it was associated with linux.

it isn't really a "you should or shouldn't", it's really just "do you want to?"
but i will say though, most of the ROMs available these days all have EXT4 filesystems, so i guess you don't really have much choice.

so if the rom comes like that, do i still need to do this myself?
or do i need to do the Ext4 on the SD card itself?

gd6noob said:
so if the rom comes like that, do i still need to do this myself?
or do i need to do the Ext4 on the SD card itself?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
if a ROM comes with an EXT4 filesystem, you shouldn't need to do it manually

Honestly, unless you are making a ROM or like to micro tweak your way into figuring out how stuff works, you shouldn't need to care about what the file system is, as long as it works .
My current phone/tablet use ext4, I think my old phone used yafs2. When you might really want to care is if your phone crashes a lot, you store a lot of data (that isn't also in the cloud), or you want to turn your phone into a Wireless Network Attached Storage (WNAS), in which case you should probably soder in a standard hard drive anyway.
Sent from my Transformer TF101 using Tapatalk

USB Mass Storage (SGS3 Easy UMS)

Our tablet lacks the USB Mass Storage capability, also Note 2 lacks this also.
I have found this little gem app that works on Note 2, i hope that someone here will test this and report back.
It only works on external SD, but it is way better then MTP.
Here is the app thread:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1711009
[UPDATE] It works very well, also with the SD card formated as exFat! :thumbup:
Thanks.

mdalacu said:
Our tablet lacks the USB Mass Storage capability, also Note 2 lacks this also.
I have found this little gem app that works on Note 2, i hope that someone here will test this and report back.
It only works on external SD, but it is way better then MTP.
Here is the app thread:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1711009
Thanks.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
How is this better than MTP? I connect my Note and it shows up - I double click on it and it shows me a drive for the internal and external storage and you can drag file in and out of them. The only two issues are that when you copy some kinds of media, you get asked if you want to convert it - and on the Note, it runs an actual app to do the MTP. It's odd because other Android devices don't do that (even the Samsung Nexus doesn't).

TheWerewolf said:
How is this better than MTP? I connect my Note and it shows up - I double click on it and it shows me a drive for the internal and external storage and you can drag file in and out of them. The only two issues are that when you copy some kinds of media, you get asked if you want to convert it - and on the Note, it runs an actual app to do the MTP. It's odd because other Android devices don't do that (even the Samsung Nexus doesn't).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you use other OSes then Windows you will notice the difference, it does not work reliable on Linux and Mac. MTP is slow , with UMS i get something about 20MB/s read/write. Also, if you have to modify a file then that file will first be downloaded locally on your PC, modified and the reuploaded instead of modify it on the phone. This is how MTP works.

I have used the app 10 times by now, no issues at all. I also checked the sd card with scan disk on win7, no corruption !

By the way, there's a good technical reason why modern Android devices don't do USB Mass Storage.
USB Mass Storage operates on an *entire partition* and needs *exclusive* access to that partition. So the phone needs to be able to totally *un-mount* the partition (stop using it entirely) which is to be mounted as USB Mass Storage.
Older devices like my Samsung Galaxy S2 had the built-in storage separately partitioned. The downside to this, however, was that app storage was on a small, limited partition so even though the phone had 16GB, apps were limited to a 2GB (or so) partition.
New devices have all data on one partition so the app data can expand as far as it needs to into your storage space, but it means that it's no longer possible to mount it over USB Mass Storage as you can no longer get exclusive access to a partition.

MercuryStar said:
By the way, there's a good technical reason why modern Android devices don't do USB Mass Storage.
USB Mass Storage operates on an *entire partition* and needs *exclusive* access to that partition. So the phone needs to be able to totally *un-mount* the partition (stop using it entirely) which is to be mounted as USB Mass Storage.
Older devices like my Samsung Galaxy S2 had the built-in storage separately partitioned. The downside to this, however, was that app storage was on a small, limited partition so even though the phone had 16GB, apps were limited to a 2GB (or so) partition.
New devices have all data on one partition so the app data can expand as far as it needs to into your storage space, but it means that it's no longer possible to mount it over USB Mass Storage as you can no longer get exclusive access to a partition.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Wow that is an awesome explanation of the process. I personally have wondered for quite a while why new devices are this way, just never really bothered looking into it. Thanks.
Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2

MercuryStar said:
By the way, there's a good technical reason why modern Android devices don't do USB Mass Storage.
USB Mass Storage operates on an *entire partition* and needs *exclusive* access to that partition. So the phone needs to be able to totally *un-mount* the partition (stop using it entirely) which is to be mounted as USB Mass Storage.
Older devices like my Samsung Galaxy S2 had the built-in storage separately partitioned. The downside to this, however, was that app storage was on a small, limited partition so even though the phone had 16GB, apps were limited to a 2GB (or so) partition.
New devices have all data on one partition so the app data can expand as far as it needs to into your storage space, but it means that it's no longer possible to mount it over USB Mass Storage as you can no longer get exclusive access to a partition.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You are right about internal storage, but , this app only exports the External SD Card, which is formtated as FAT32 or ExFat. The app first unmounts the card from phone, export it through USB, then with the middle button, when you are done on PC (end ejected the card), will mount it right back.
This way you could check the SD card on the PC, copy large files very fast, directly modify files, works on linux and mac !

I have tested this on N8000 and it is working perfectly

mdalacu said:
Our tablet lacks the USB Mass Storage capability, also Note 2 lacks this also.
I have found this little gem app that works on Note 2, i hope that someone here will test this and report back.
It only works on external SD, but it is way better then MTP.
Here is the app thread:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1711009
Thanks.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ah, this app. I posted about this in September in this thread lol: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=32103479#post32103479

Sorry, I have missed it.

Great! Thank you! It works like a charm!
Inviato dal mio GT-N8000 con Tapatalk 2

Another weakness in MTP is that if you are in a locked down environment with no admin/privileges to install devices MTP will not be detected. (You'll get the same nonsense with iOS as well)

has anyone been able to get this working with a ps3. I would like to be able to transfer things to my ps3.

So, no method exists that would allow the Note 10.1 to connect as UMS to Windows XP? and/or without the use of the inserted MicroSD?
I installed KIES but it tried to install like 3 versions of Net Framework and other garbage, so I removed it. There is no way I will use the KIES. I tried to use the driver that Kies installed along with the SAMSUNG_USB_Driver_for_Mobile_Phones.exe but no luck. I can't believe this is an issue.
I'm a bit of a novice with tablets/android and have searched a long time for a solution with no luck.

It only export the external sd card through UMS, the internal one it is impossible. For me, it works on XP x64 just fine.

Has anyone tried multi mount, i use it on my galaxy s to listen to music while i am mounted to the pc, works well but i think it a bit buggy cause i can't get my external sd card to mount but i don't know if that the rom cause it worked well on the previous rom, try it out multi mount
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Sent from a I9000 running JB Rom
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If I helped you hit thanks

mdalacu said:
It only export the external sd card through UMS, the internal one it is impossible. For me, it works on XP x64 just fine.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
OK. Thank you.

TheWerewolf said:
How is this better than MTP? I connect my Note and it shows up - I double click on it and it shows me a drive for the internal and external storage and you can drag file in and out of them...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
For example, how would you run a program like Recuva to scan for deleted files on my S3? Also, they say MTP i smuch slower.

critofur said:
For example, how would you run a program like Recuva to scan for deleted files on my S3? Also, they say MTP i smuch slower.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
For recovery of deleted files, you can use Undelete for Root users straight from your phone!

mdalacu said:
Our tablet lacks the USB Mass Storage capability, also Note 2 lacks this also.
I have found this little gem app that works on Note 2, i hope that someone here will test this and report back.
It only works on external SD, but it is way better then MTP.
Here is the app thread:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1711009
Thanks.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank You for posting this!!! I have been sick of playing a crap shoot when I connect my note to my computer!!! :victory:

[Q] Trying to get external storage to work

Hi,
I am so close to getting this setup how I wanted - it's frustrating...
I have a nexus player - loaded kodi, side loaded NHL network, side loaded Amazon app - all that is working. I attach a 4TB USB drive (formatted fat32) and although ES file explorer can see it and Kodi can use it, I cannot get move to SD working...
I rooted it, I have super user working, I installed stickmount and ran that and tried using folder mount with no luck.
The external drive almost looks like it shows up as 2 drives...
When I unplugged the drive Kodi somehow cannot see it anymore when plugged back into the hub.
I want to be able to load this stuff up because this setup is getting taken to a camper where the only internet will be my phone as a wifi hot spot but I don't want to burn a ton of data - I want to use play later to add to the collection up there by just transferring new files on a USB stick, also use that to sideload any APK's up there.
Right now the unit itself was so full I cannot install anything more so I was looking for an app2sd option like my phone and used the (root, su, stickmount, foldermount way I read in several places).
I had to uninstall things just to install foldermount but if there are menu's on that I cannot access them so I can get to createpair screen and navigate to the place where you would populate destination, but once at that screen - there is no way I can see to save that - just has up (go back)... so I am totally stuck - been at it for hours - about to just take it back and build a small htpc but I really liked the idea of such a small device with the limited space I have at the camper.
I admit I do not have a good understanding of how Android deals with it's file structure and mounting drives / volumes.
Is what I am trying to do possible or am I asking for to much?

I discribed the only way i found that works here:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=61584727&postcount=158
Without the ability to install on an external location i think the nexus player is worthless.
Almost every good game is almost 2 GB shame on you google ......
8GB for a TV box is way too little without an external SD card !!!

I tried your way numerous times but it doesn't mount the 2nd partition, sometimes it doesn't see the 2nd partition, (intermittent) ...any ideas?
Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk