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Another Android Failure Mode
My new Android tablet started misbehaving. It had been working fine, but suddenly decided to go into a loop on boot.
It has a 32GB microSD card installed where things like eBooks live. Pop out the card and the tablet boots fine. The FAT32 filesystem on the card had no issues.
But the card is partitioned. My device is rooted, so I carved out a 3GB partition on the card formatted with the Linux ext4 file system. The system sees and mounts the ext4 slice on boot as a file system. This lets me use a utility to move large apps to the card and create links to them in the root filesystem. Android follows the links and runs the apps as though they were in internal storage.
The problem was in the second partition. I hadn't moved all that much to it, so I bit the bullet, deleted and recreated the second partition and redid the ext4 format. The tablet would boot.
I started to re-download stuff that had been on the card, install it, then move it. Google Docs, Sheets and Slides installed and moved fine. Firefox installed and moved. Google+ and Chrome did not. Both refuse to install, claiming Insufficient Storage. The tablet thinks there are 650MB of free app storage space out of the 2GB it has by default.
WTF?
I can live without Chrome (since I prefer Firefox anyway) and Google+ on the tablet, so I'm leaving well enough alone. I suspect a full cure would involve restoring to factory default state and starting over from scratch. I have travel coming up next week, and want a working tablet when I go, so I'm not diving down that particular rat hole now.
But I really wish I knew what was going on.
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Dennis
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