Partitioning your SD card:
---------------------------
Preface: This covers only steps involving using an SD already in the phone. Steps involved with installing a new SD are similar, but just involve extra steps with unmounting the original card, turning the phone off, and installing a new card before proceeding with partitioning.
1. Reboot the phone into recovery, plug in, toggle USB M-S to ON, and backup the contents of your SD to your computer.(Partitioning the SD wipes its contents completely. If you've gone as far as installing a custom rom, you should already know how to do this backup. Backups of everything are a lifeline for any android nut.) Turn off USB M-S.
2. Go back into the main menu for recovery, and choose "Partition sdcard". It will ask you to confirm by pressing menu or any other key to abort. Confirm.
3. Now you set the partition sizes. Follow on-screen instructions to do so. Linux swap ("Swap-size") is a partition that is used largely in the same way as Windows uses a page file if I understand correctly (I'm open to corrections). It's not always used, but I would say it's a bad idea to not have one. Set one just in case. The typical size is 32 MB. SD-EXT ("Ext2-size") is the partition that will be used to move your apps and dalvik cache to your SD card. Typical size is 512 MB. I used that size until my recent upgrade to an 8 GB SD card, on which I partitioned 1024 MB (1 GB) for SD-EXT. After setting these two, recovery will automatically use the remainder of the SD card's storage space for FAT32 ("FAT32-size"). FAT32 is the filesystem for the very large partition of the SD card that you can see and use. The contents you backed up to your computer are stored in this partition.
4. Once you've set the partition sizes, recovery will now ask you, "Continue partitioning?" Again you must confirm or abort. Confirm. It will then begin to partition the card. This is where you become grateful that you've backed up everything that was on your SD card, because now, it's empty.
5. When it finishes, it tells you, and you have your partitioning menu back. Scroll down to the option that says "SD:ext2 to ext3" and select it. Confirm your choice. (An Ext3 partition is necessary for A2SD to work here. It'll take a minute and then finish, as before.)
6. Go back to the main menu, and toggle USB M-S to ON again. Copy your previously-backed-up SD contents to the card. Turn off USB M-S, go back to the main menu, and reboot the phone.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A2SD steps for DarkTremor scripts already installed:
------------------------------------------------------
Preface: note "already installed". If you have a rom installed like Joneidy's sense rom, then you have DarkTremor A2SD scripts installed. If you do not have them installed, here's a link that should help, and also has some similar instructions to what I provide here on usage after install: (Darktremor Installation Instructions | Facebook). If you need the scripts, here's a link: (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=715940)These steps only explain how to use the DarkTremor scripts. The first set of steps explain how to do it through ADB Shell, and the second set of steps explain how to do it using A2SDGUI, the app designed specifically to work with the DarkTremor scripts. If you want to do this the ***easy*** way, skip past and scroll down to the steps for A2SDGUI.
Through ADB Shell (These steps assume you already have ADB installed and know how to get into it, and gain superuser access. These steps start after having already come to the superuser prompt, noted by a "#" before where you type in the command prompt or terminal):
1. Type "a2sd check". This will give you a run-down of the status of where your Dalvik cache runs from, and where your apps and private apps run from. Read carefully through the results that come up (you can scroll through the command prompt--just maximize the window and scroll up), and they should explain what must be done next.
2. If the above reveals that your apps are NOT running from SD card, then you should see that it has told you to type "a2sd reinstall". Do that, and sit there and watch the magic happen (as it moves your apps to your SD-ext partition). It'll take a minute or two, and then your phone will reboot (the command prompt will tell you when it's about to--don't disconnect your phone), and you will be exited out of adb shell. (Once you move your apps to SD, the main boot process won't change much, but after your homescreens load, in your app drawer, some things will appear to be missing. Maybe even your home launcher will lock up and try to force close. If so, just tap Wait, and in either case, just wait a minute. It'll all come back. This is how boots will be from now on, but after that, everything will proceed as normal.) Once booted, go back into A2SDGUI.
3. If the "a2sd check" told you that your Dalvik cache is still running from internal storage, go back into adb shell and into the su prompt, then type "a2sd cachesd". This will migrate your Dalvik cache to your SD-ext partition as well in the same fashion as above, including a reboot. On either this step or the last step, you may see some sort of error toward the end of either process. Continue with the next steps to verify that you've achieved the above tasks. If so, don't worry about it.
4. Run "a2sd check" again. If the results tell you all is well, and that your apps, private apps, and dalvik cache all run from the SD card, then no worries, you should be good to go.
5. To see the benefits once you've completed the above steps, go back into ADB shell again, and type "a2sd sysinfo". Yes, you will get a BUTTLOAD of information thrown at you. scroll back up, and you should find crammed in there a line that says "[ ] Partition Information:", and then below that, a large list of partitions. Many of them are just your list of apps on SD, but the first few are where you want to look. Easy identification is found by looking in the right-hand column for any of these entries under the heading "Mounted on". Look for the line that says "/data"--it should be the 4th one down. That's your phone's internal storage for apps. Each line has size, used, and available. You should see that out of ~200 MB, you still have a majority of it remaining after you've moved everything to SD.
6. The last thing I recommend is setting ZipAlign to run every boot. I don't understand all the technical stuff behind it, but I take it to mean kind of a "defrag" of all your apps. Basically your data will all be streamlined, and you'll boot up much faster. I sure do. Just type in the command "a2sd zipalign", and you should be good to go. Then reboot your phone twice. You should see a faster boot on the second reboot.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Through A2SDGUI (First off, this is an app available for free on the Android Market. This is the easy method. It will only work for you if you are a) of course rooted (you wouldn't even have DarkTremor if you weren't), and b) you have the DarkTremor scripts installed (again, in this case they come already with Joneidy's sense rom). Just search the Market for "A2SDGUI" exactly. It should be one of the first results that come up. Download/Install the app, open it, then follow these steps):
1. Opening the app, a popup will tell you roughly that you're doing this at your own risk, and you can't get mad at them if things go wrong, but that everything will probably go alright. Click "Yes" to continue. (Later steps will only cover buttons that apply to achieving the goal of migrating stuff to SD-ext and setting up zipalign. Other buttons will not be mentioned.)
2. The first tab it always starts on is the Apps2SD tab. After you click "Yes" to continue and the app finishes loading, the first button on this tab will either say "Apps are on internal Storage!" or it will say "Apps are on SD!". If it says "Apps are on internal Storage!", tap the button to move your apps to SD. I think the phone is supposed to reboot here, I'm not sure. It does reboot when doing this in ADB Shell, so it probably does here. I have too many apps to move them back to internal storage with the gui to try it out lol (I originally moved my apps to SD with ADB). If it says "Apps are on SD!" then, well, leave it alone lol. (Once you move your apps to SD, the main boot process won't change much, but after your homescreens load, in your app drawer, some things will appear to be missing. Maybe even your home launcher will lock up and try to force close. If so, just tap Wait, and in either case, just wait a minute. It'll all come back. This is how boots will be from now on, but after that, everything will proceed as normal.) Once booted, go back into A2SDGUI.
3. The next button says either "Zipalign on boot is OFF!" or "Zipalign on boot is ON!". ON is better and = faster boots. Turn it on if it's off. I have yet to see any adverse effects. Reboot your phone, and then reboot again. After the 2nd reboot when everything has already been zipaligned, you should see a difference in boot speed. For a somewhat laymen's description as to what Zipalign is, see step 6 above in the ADB Shell instructions.
4. Tap the 2nd tab at the top. It should look like a pie-chart with the word "Dalvik" underneath it. The tab will take a minute to load as it's analyzing where everything is at. Once that's done, you'll see three options up top with blue or white dots next to them. The one with the blue dot is the current status. The statuses are: "Dalvik Cache on SD-EXT", "Dalvik Cache on /cache", and "Dalvik Cache on Internal memory". If it's already on SD-EXT after the tab loads, leave it alone. If it's on internal storage, tap the option for SD-EXT, observe the statement in RED that says "Any of these actions will reboot your device!", and then tap "Move!", and let your phone do its thang.
5. Once you're rebooted, go back into the A2SDGUI app, and make your way over to the 4th tab labeled "System Info", that has a green circle with a white "i" in it. Once it loads, you can see the benefits of your apps+cache migration. You should have over 100 mb freed up in your internal memory.
Enjoy!
EDIT: For reasons posted in another thread, I ended up re-flashing Joneidy's updated Sense ROM, and after getting it all set up and rebooting a few times, I've noticed that this time around I'm not experiencing near the delay that I was before for all things SD to kick in. So you might have better luck than I first described.
EDIT 2: I've discovered with experience that Joneidy's recovery, bless his heart, can't do much with an SD-EXT partition except create it and upgrade it. If you want the ability to specifically wipe the SD-EXT partition without re-partitioning the card, use getitnowmarketing's All In One 2.2.1 recovery. Here's a scenario in which you might want to wipe SD-EXT along with /data, etc:
If you're switching roms, but you know the next rom you use you'll still be using A2SD, whether it's included or going to be installed later, you'll want a fresh start, with fresh app installs from TiBu, etc. This is needed because when you wipe /data, /system, etc, you're removing all the symbolic links created by A2SD, and so you'll have a bunch of useless stuff in your SD-EXT partition. So you wipe it with everything else, but you don't need to partition the card, so your FAT32 partition can stay as-is.
Joneidy's a great guy (so nothin personal man), but here's a link to getitnowmarketing's recovery: http://androidforums.com/getitnowmarketing/330813-all-one-recovery-thread.html
His recovery (and a lot of them) are navigable in largely the same way. You should be able to adapt my original instructions to his menus. Also, his recovery lets you backup SD-EXT, and really, backup everything to one giant big fat bloated image of your phone, SD, etc, except your FAT32 partition--still on your own for that of course. This is useful with A2SD, since SD-EXT is made part of the file system.
---------------------------
Preface: This covers only steps involving using an SD already in the phone. Steps involved with installing a new SD are similar, but just involve extra steps with unmounting the original card, turning the phone off, and installing a new card before proceeding with partitioning.
1. Reboot the phone into recovery, plug in, toggle USB M-S to ON, and backup the contents of your SD to your computer.(Partitioning the SD wipes its contents completely. If you've gone as far as installing a custom rom, you should already know how to do this backup. Backups of everything are a lifeline for any android nut.) Turn off USB M-S.
2. Go back into the main menu for recovery, and choose "Partition sdcard". It will ask you to confirm by pressing menu or any other key to abort. Confirm.
3. Now you set the partition sizes. Follow on-screen instructions to do so. Linux swap ("Swap-size") is a partition that is used largely in the same way as Windows uses a page file if I understand correctly (I'm open to corrections). It's not always used, but I would say it's a bad idea to not have one. Set one just in case. The typical size is 32 MB. SD-EXT ("Ext2-size") is the partition that will be used to move your apps and dalvik cache to your SD card. Typical size is 512 MB. I used that size until my recent upgrade to an 8 GB SD card, on which I partitioned 1024 MB (1 GB) for SD-EXT. After setting these two, recovery will automatically use the remainder of the SD card's storage space for FAT32 ("FAT32-size"). FAT32 is the filesystem for the very large partition of the SD card that you can see and use. The contents you backed up to your computer are stored in this partition.
4. Once you've set the partition sizes, recovery will now ask you, "Continue partitioning?" Again you must confirm or abort. Confirm. It will then begin to partition the card. This is where you become grateful that you've backed up everything that was on your SD card, because now, it's empty.
5. When it finishes, it tells you, and you have your partitioning menu back. Scroll down to the option that says "SD:ext2 to ext3" and select it. Confirm your choice. (An Ext3 partition is necessary for A2SD to work here. It'll take a minute and then finish, as before.)
6. Go back to the main menu, and toggle USB M-S to ON again. Copy your previously-backed-up SD contents to the card. Turn off USB M-S, go back to the main menu, and reboot the phone.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A2SD steps for DarkTremor scripts already installed:
------------------------------------------------------
Preface: note "already installed". If you have a rom installed like Joneidy's sense rom, then you have DarkTremor A2SD scripts installed. If you do not have them installed, here's a link that should help, and also has some similar instructions to what I provide here on usage after install: (Darktremor Installation Instructions | Facebook). If you need the scripts, here's a link: (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=715940)These steps only explain how to use the DarkTremor scripts. The first set of steps explain how to do it through ADB Shell, and the second set of steps explain how to do it using A2SDGUI, the app designed specifically to work with the DarkTremor scripts. If you want to do this the ***easy*** way, skip past and scroll down to the steps for A2SDGUI.
Through ADB Shell (These steps assume you already have ADB installed and know how to get into it, and gain superuser access. These steps start after having already come to the superuser prompt, noted by a "#" before where you type in the command prompt or terminal):
1. Type "a2sd check". This will give you a run-down of the status of where your Dalvik cache runs from, and where your apps and private apps run from. Read carefully through the results that come up (you can scroll through the command prompt--just maximize the window and scroll up), and they should explain what must be done next.
2. If the above reveals that your apps are NOT running from SD card, then you should see that it has told you to type "a2sd reinstall". Do that, and sit there and watch the magic happen (as it moves your apps to your SD-ext partition). It'll take a minute or two, and then your phone will reboot (the command prompt will tell you when it's about to--don't disconnect your phone), and you will be exited out of adb shell. (Once you move your apps to SD, the main boot process won't change much, but after your homescreens load, in your app drawer, some things will appear to be missing. Maybe even your home launcher will lock up and try to force close. If so, just tap Wait, and in either case, just wait a minute. It'll all come back. This is how boots will be from now on, but after that, everything will proceed as normal.) Once booted, go back into A2SDGUI.
3. If the "a2sd check" told you that your Dalvik cache is still running from internal storage, go back into adb shell and into the su prompt, then type "a2sd cachesd". This will migrate your Dalvik cache to your SD-ext partition as well in the same fashion as above, including a reboot. On either this step or the last step, you may see some sort of error toward the end of either process. Continue with the next steps to verify that you've achieved the above tasks. If so, don't worry about it.
4. Run "a2sd check" again. If the results tell you all is well, and that your apps, private apps, and dalvik cache all run from the SD card, then no worries, you should be good to go.
5. To see the benefits once you've completed the above steps, go back into ADB shell again, and type "a2sd sysinfo". Yes, you will get a BUTTLOAD of information thrown at you. scroll back up, and you should find crammed in there a line that says "[ ] Partition Information:", and then below that, a large list of partitions. Many of them are just your list of apps on SD, but the first few are where you want to look. Easy identification is found by looking in the right-hand column for any of these entries under the heading "Mounted on". Look for the line that says "/data"--it should be the 4th one down. That's your phone's internal storage for apps. Each line has size, used, and available. You should see that out of ~200 MB, you still have a majority of it remaining after you've moved everything to SD.
6. The last thing I recommend is setting ZipAlign to run every boot. I don't understand all the technical stuff behind it, but I take it to mean kind of a "defrag" of all your apps. Basically your data will all be streamlined, and you'll boot up much faster. I sure do. Just type in the command "a2sd zipalign", and you should be good to go. Then reboot your phone twice. You should see a faster boot on the second reboot.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Through A2SDGUI (First off, this is an app available for free on the Android Market. This is the easy method. It will only work for you if you are a) of course rooted (you wouldn't even have DarkTremor if you weren't), and b) you have the DarkTremor scripts installed (again, in this case they come already with Joneidy's sense rom). Just search the Market for "A2SDGUI" exactly. It should be one of the first results that come up. Download/Install the app, open it, then follow these steps):
1. Opening the app, a popup will tell you roughly that you're doing this at your own risk, and you can't get mad at them if things go wrong, but that everything will probably go alright. Click "Yes" to continue. (Later steps will only cover buttons that apply to achieving the goal of migrating stuff to SD-ext and setting up zipalign. Other buttons will not be mentioned.)
2. The first tab it always starts on is the Apps2SD tab. After you click "Yes" to continue and the app finishes loading, the first button on this tab will either say "Apps are on internal Storage!" or it will say "Apps are on SD!". If it says "Apps are on internal Storage!", tap the button to move your apps to SD. I think the phone is supposed to reboot here, I'm not sure. It does reboot when doing this in ADB Shell, so it probably does here. I have too many apps to move them back to internal storage with the gui to try it out lol (I originally moved my apps to SD with ADB). If it says "Apps are on SD!" then, well, leave it alone lol. (Once you move your apps to SD, the main boot process won't change much, but after your homescreens load, in your app drawer, some things will appear to be missing. Maybe even your home launcher will lock up and try to force close. If so, just tap Wait, and in either case, just wait a minute. It'll all come back. This is how boots will be from now on, but after that, everything will proceed as normal.) Once booted, go back into A2SDGUI.
3. The next button says either "Zipalign on boot is OFF!" or "Zipalign on boot is ON!". ON is better and = faster boots. Turn it on if it's off. I have yet to see any adverse effects. Reboot your phone, and then reboot again. After the 2nd reboot when everything has already been zipaligned, you should see a difference in boot speed. For a somewhat laymen's description as to what Zipalign is, see step 6 above in the ADB Shell instructions.
4. Tap the 2nd tab at the top. It should look like a pie-chart with the word "Dalvik" underneath it. The tab will take a minute to load as it's analyzing where everything is at. Once that's done, you'll see three options up top with blue or white dots next to them. The one with the blue dot is the current status. The statuses are: "Dalvik Cache on SD-EXT", "Dalvik Cache on /cache", and "Dalvik Cache on Internal memory". If it's already on SD-EXT after the tab loads, leave it alone. If it's on internal storage, tap the option for SD-EXT, observe the statement in RED that says "Any of these actions will reboot your device!", and then tap "Move!", and let your phone do its thang.
5. Once you're rebooted, go back into the A2SDGUI app, and make your way over to the 4th tab labeled "System Info", that has a green circle with a white "i" in it. Once it loads, you can see the benefits of your apps+cache migration. You should have over 100 mb freed up in your internal memory.
Enjoy!
EDIT: For reasons posted in another thread, I ended up re-flashing Joneidy's updated Sense ROM, and after getting it all set up and rebooting a few times, I've noticed that this time around I'm not experiencing near the delay that I was before for all things SD to kick in. So you might have better luck than I first described.
EDIT 2: I've discovered with experience that Joneidy's recovery, bless his heart, can't do much with an SD-EXT partition except create it and upgrade it. If you want the ability to specifically wipe the SD-EXT partition without re-partitioning the card, use getitnowmarketing's All In One 2.2.1 recovery. Here's a scenario in which you might want to wipe SD-EXT along with /data, etc:
If you're switching roms, but you know the next rom you use you'll still be using A2SD, whether it's included or going to be installed later, you'll want a fresh start, with fresh app installs from TiBu, etc. This is needed because when you wipe /data, /system, etc, you're removing all the symbolic links created by A2SD, and so you'll have a bunch of useless stuff in your SD-EXT partition. So you wipe it with everything else, but you don't need to partition the card, so your FAT32 partition can stay as-is.
Joneidy's a great guy (so nothin personal man), but here's a link to getitnowmarketing's recovery: http://androidforums.com/getitnowmarketing/330813-all-one-recovery-thread.html
His recovery (and a lot of them) are navigable in largely the same way. You should be able to adapt my original instructions to his menus. Also, his recovery lets you backup SD-EXT, and really, backup everything to one giant big fat bloated image of your phone, SD, etc, except your FAT32 partition--still on your own for that of course. This is useful with A2SD, since SD-EXT is made part of the file system.
