[How To] Move Apps to your SDcard in Ermine

[Jeff Butler]

I also would love a step-by-step guide for us non-linux folks...

Please...

Jeff

[flyred77]

So I just read this statement on the TiBU's feature list. "Move app data to/from SD card (needs ext2/3/4 partition)"

Does that mean that I STILL have to walk through all the steps given here to move app data to the card OR can UI create just an EXT2 partition as primary and use TiBU to do it without making all the boot and sys changes?

TIA

[flyred77]

BUT, it was not as easy as expected. My husband took care of this for me because I am not a Linux geek. I am an experienced user, but this was out of my league.

He learned a lot that he hopes to find time to share with everyone.

[tekknogenius]

Originally Posted by flyred77

BUT, it was not as easy as expected. My husband took care of this for me because I am not a Linux geek. I am an experienced user, but this was out of my league.

He learned a lot that he hopes to find time to share with everyone.

Having access to a linux box makes it much simpler to create the partions. Three commands takes care of it all.

cfdisk /dev/sda to create the two partitions on the sdcard
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda2 to format the ext3 partition
mkfs.vfat /dev/sda1 to format the vfat partition

Note the sda portion of the above commands is only if your sdcard loads as sda, it coulld be sdb or sdc or sdd or sde ... you could check by running dmesg to see what it loaded as.

There are other ways of doing this, of course, but this is how I did it.

[danceyeah]

I got my PE set up (wow, what a headache!) the way Kenny indicated. My edge now lets me install apps and then link them over to the EXT3 partition of my sd card (sdext2 directory). But I still have a couple of small problems.

The first is that one of my apps allows me access to a large library...about 500 mb of materials. That's too much material for the space on the edge internal partition. But that library doesn't want to move over to the card. I can physically copy it to the sdext2, but then the app won't recognize that it's there. Link2SD says it allows library materials to be linked over, but I think what's going on in this case is that the app stores everything in a database, so Link2SD doesn't recognize it and move it over. (The app is Gospel Library from the LDS church if anyone is willing to give this a go...) I'm wondering if anyone knows of any app that works similarly to Link2SD but that will allow me to point an app to the SD directory to find db materials.

The second issue is that every time I start up the PE I get an error saying that the SD card is blank. This is more a minor annoyance than anything. Like I said, Link2SD is using the sdext2 directory for apps when I ask it to. And anything I put on the FAT32 partition shows up in libraries (music files, for instance). If anyone knows how to turn off that particular error message, that would be appreciated.

Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated!!!!

[tekknogenius]

Originally Posted by danceyeah

The second issue is that every time I start up the PE I get an error saying that the SD card is blank. This is more a minor annoyance than anything. Like I said, Link2SD is using the sdext2 directory for apps when I ask it to. And anything I put on the FAT32 partition shows up in libraries (music files, for instance). If anyone knows how to turn off that particular error message, that would be appreciated.

Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated!!!!

Make sure you have it setup correctly. Check the storage info from link2sd (menu/storage info). You should see all three partitions: internal, sd card and sd card 2nd partition. It doesn't sound like you have it setup correctly.

[danceyeah]

When I check in Link2SD it shows 3 partitions:

Internal (58% Free)
Total: 322MB Used: 132MB Free: 190MB

SD Card (98% Free)
Total: 11.83GB Used: 183MB Free: 11.65GB

SD Card 2nd Part. (99% Free)
Total: 2.89GB Used: 14.34MB Free 2.88GB



Since I have a 16GB card (which totals 14 usable gig) and SD Card and SD Card 2nd Part. add to that 14GB (and a 3/11 split is what I formatted it for), it seems that the card is being read correctly.

Of course, the "internal sd" which is the main chunk of on-board memory doesn't show, but I think that's at least half full of running things anyway (like the preinstalled help videos), and I'm not that worried about that. If I could access it to put the library files on there, that would be nice, but when I tried to move to the app to sd before I started the whole process, it said that was already too full to move it back then.

[tekknogenius]

Well it seems that all partitions are loaded correctly. Perhaps you need to increase the sleep in the install-recovery.sh file in the /etc directory (that's what mounts the two partitions). You should not be getting that "blank sd card" message. Also, when you look at the device storage from the android settings menu, do you see that your 1st partition is loaded as the internal storage total space, SD card total space should be 2.4 gb and application storage should show 322 mb (that really is a very small amount LOL)

[Last_of_the_PEs]

I finally got a 32GB micro-SD (from 1SaleaDay) and thought I'd try "the big move". Then I read this thread and decided to hold off.

If I run out of memory, I'll just kill myself instead.

[tekknogenius]

Originally Posted by Last_of_the_PEs

I finally got a 32GB micro-SD (from 1SaleaDay) and thought I'd try "the big move". Then I read this thread and decided to hold off.

If I run out of memory, I'll just kill myself instead.

You've got a 32gb SD ... what are you waiting for? Just do it!

[Filark]

Originally Posted by Last_of_the_PEs

I finally got a 32GB micro-SD (from 1SaleaDay) and thought I'd try "the big move". Then I read this thread and decided to hold off.

If I run out of memory, I'll just kill myself instead.

I know what you mean! But think how nice it will be when it's done!

[flyred77]

Originally Posted by danceyeah

The second issue is that every time I start up the PE I get an error saying that the SD card is blank. This is more a minor annoyance than anything. Like I said, Link2SD is using the sdext2 directory for apps when I ask it to. And anything I put on the FAT32 partition shows up in libraries (music files, for instance). If anyone knows how to turn off that particular error message, that would be appreciated.

Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated!!!!

It sounds like maybe you are not getting your SD mounted correctly or perhaps you are mounting it late enough in the boot sequence that it has not finished mounting when you are up and running. This happens to me me when I connect to my computer. The system seems to un-mount the card completely and then of course there is no way to remount other than a reboot. Since DH is the Linux guru, I am going to talk to him about a little script that I can execute from a shortcut to remount that thing so I don't have to reboot every time. I also have to be very careful, because when it is unmounted, my eDGe offers to format it for me when I do try to access it. Of course if I would take the time to set up my network shares, I could save myself from work and not have to connect to the PC as often!

[akatonbo]

Many thanks to kennyminot and everyone who contributed tips on how they got things working. I finally got it to behave itself after doing a FULL (overwrite) reformat with SDFormatter and then repartitioning, and it's going to save me so much trouble on my eDGe (and let me play with some of the huge beautiful games I've been avoiding because they take up double digit megabytes). Kudos for all your efforts and documentation of them!

[multiprose]

hi!

i completed the procedure successfully but i have a question.

could this mod affect the USB debugging option? after doing this mod, I found that i could no longer connect the PE to my PC through USB debugging and have the drives show up.

[asnider123]

Originally Posted by jmgazer

Using Mini Tool for SD card (8GB), EE reads the SD with 4GB size partition, but when I use the remainder unallocated for ext2, 3, or 4 the EE says "Damaged SD card". What am I doing wrong? What do I do with the unallocated space?

Jim

Now when I make a second partition with ext2 I get "Blank SD Card", and files and folders dissappear. Can see them in windows, and of course not the ext2 partition except in the Mini Tool program.

I got a 16gb card and I am having the same problem. However, swapping the extsdcard and sdcard works fine, providing the card has only one partition, that's where I am right now, with a 16g "sdcard" and a 3g "extcard". Which got me to thinking ....

Since Android allows "mounts" or redirects, I am thinking I could mount that 3gig partition as whatever the Android normally installs programs. That would give me 3gb instead of 300mb of apps space and leave me 16gb for data.

So how can I accomplish this? I know it should be as easy as adding another mount command to the sdcard script, but not sure how to write it.

Thanks
Alan