Still looking for some help with this....

[mcampellone]

I am still looking for a solution for this issue. You are quite right - the internal storage, which is labeled as "USB Storage", is recognized as the first SD card. I have made a step by step bunch of screen shots below, to show exactly what I mean. Also, why I feel that 2GB will not be enough storage for me - I have a LOT of apps purchased, however I will need more space, and on my last device installing many of these to the SD card was never a problem. So, here we go - these screen shots are just to make sure that we are on the same page and that I explain myself fully.....

This first screen shot is the main screen of my phone after powering on:

This next photos shows that I just pull up the settings menu:

Under "Settings", I select "Storage" as follows:

This next screen shows that the "preferred install location" is the SD Card and NOT the USB Storage. (The USB Storage is what it calls the built-in 2GB storage in the phone). It also shows the Internal Storage is 503MB as shown:

Now, when scrolling a bit down, you see that the internal phone storage, which is 2GB, is called "USB Storage". Why they gave it this name, I will never know. This is where the apps are moving to whenever I run App2SD Pro......

Scrolling a bit further down, you can see how that 2GB of internal memory, called "USB Storage", is broken down as 352MB Apps, 99.64MB Pictures and videos, and leaving 1.54GB available. Then, below that it shows the TRUE physical external SD card that I have inserted in the card slot, with total space of 29.70GB, with 29.62GB available, as shown:

Here is the very end of scrolling to the bottom of that same screen, just for reference......

Now, with that out of the way, here is where I go into Apps and I launch App 2 SD Pro as shown:

Here, in App 2 SD's main screen, I will use Adobe Flash as the example app here. You can also see at the bottom that it is referencing the total INTERNAL storage, and NOT the secondary "USB" storage...

Here, once I select the "On SD Card" tab, if you look at the bottom, it is actually referencing the internal "USB" storage, and NOT the SD card...... as shown.....

Now, to start the example - I will select Adobe Flash from the "Movable Apps" screen as shown...

You will see that my only choice is to "Move to USB Storage" and NOT to move to the SD card - that is not even an option....

Once the move is finished, the choice changes to "Move to Internal Storage" as shown:

You can see now, on the "On SD Card" tab in App 2 SD Pro, Flash is now there, but the bottom is still referencing the 2GB of internal "USB" storage and not the SD card.... as shown....

Now, back to my apps, I will launch my ASTRO File Manager Pro as shown:

Here, in the mounted volumes, you will see that it shows "SDCard" and "SDCard2" rather than "USB Storage" and "SD Card", as shown:

When you go into "SDCard", which is actually the 2GB internal "USB" storage, you will see all of the folders created, etc. and this is where all of the installs are going. As shown:

And finally, when you go into SDCard2, which in reality is my large SD Card, the ONLY folders that were created were Android and LOST.DIR - both of which were pretty empty. I manually created the rest and moved any pictures, movies, etc. that I could from the internal storage....

Now, I DID download the SDK tools, installed the USB driver for my phone, hooked up to the PC via USB in debug mode, and I carried out the "adb shell pm setInstallLocation 2" command and it took. Even after doing that, this is still a problem, and has had no effect at all.

I SHOULD be able to install apps to the SD card, otherwise 2GB of storage to work with, at least for me, is NOT ENOUGH for apps - especially since I use a LOT of business apps, etc. - - and coming from my iPhone, where I had NO music, but rather 20GB of apps, I will need the space.

Someone told me to root the phone, convert the two internal partitions and create a single new partition for Android etc., forcing the system to see the external as SD Card.... I have one of our techs who is very used to rooting Android devices coming to help me tomorrow. But, in all honestly I would much rather not - I would like to keep the phone original, etc. and just get this to work if possible?

What really pisses me off, is that even in the phone's OWN settings, it specifically gives the choice to make the default installation location for new apps EITHER the "USB Storage" location, or the "SD Card" - and STILL it installs to the internal "USB" storage. I just don't get it.

I have heard this is also very common on a lot of Samsung devices too.

AT ANY RATE - MY QUESTION (YES!! I have a question! LOL) - is, can ANYONE out there who might have dealt with crap like this before possibly give me any help or pointers at all? If I can't figure this stupid thing out, I will have to scrap the whole phone and get another device..... Maybe go back to iPhone. But I would really like to make this work.

THANK YOU very much ahead of time for any help or advice you can give me - I really do appreciate it!

Thanks,

Mike

 

[chanchan05]

Its due to the partitioning. The app labels are weird I know (I don't know what your phone is), but for some reason the manufacturers neglected to use correct partitioning. Android recognizes the intial onboard storage as where apps get installed, and apps can only recognize the first SD card partition because the next SD card partition for the external card shows up as just a folder inside the onboard SD card.

On my Samsung device, there is no partition on the internal memory.

So yeah, AFAIK you have to root and repartition.

 

[Crashdamage]

Its due to the partitioning. The app labels are weird I know (I don't know what your phone is), but for some reason the manufacturers neglected to use correct partitioning. Android recognizes the intial onboard storage as where apps get installed, and apps can only recognize the first SD card partition because the next SD card partition for the external card shows up as just a folder inside the onboard SD card.

The various names are making things confusing, but the partitioning isn't really incorrect. I'll try to clear things up a little.

In this case, as usual for phones with SD card slots, there's 3 main storage areas (folders or directories). These may have different names depending on the app used to read them, the device, or Android version. Names of mount points for these may also vary. As an example, below are the mount points of the 3 main storage areas on my HTC Amaze. The mount points might be named differently on your phone:

/ - The root directory. May be called system, internal storage, etc. Formatted ext4, this partition on the internal memory is where the OS is installed and includes the 2GB area that apps are normally installed in.

/mnt/sdcard - May be called main storage, internal storage, phone storage, SDcard, etc. Formatted FAT32, this partition is the remaining internal phone memory not used for the root partition. Intended mostly for general data storage.

/mnt/sdcard/ext_sd - May be called media card, SDcard, SDcard2, external storage, etc. Formatted FAT32, this is the removable MicroSD card. Intended mostly for general data storage.

On my Samsung device, there is no partition on the internal memory.

There certainly is. See the partitions described above. Internal memory is partitioned into / and /mnt/sdcard.

So yeah, AFAIK you have to root and repartition.

Absolutely not! The names are just confusing.

To the OP: Far as I can tell, Apps2sd is giving the option to move apps to the internal data (FAT32) partition, but not the external SD card. That's ok and should work fine. In reality, the 2GB allowed for apps is almost always plenty and moving apps is unnecessary.

 

[BigRedGonzo]

I was under the impression that the newer Android builds were not able to run apps from the actual physical SD Card, i.e. SDCard2 or SDCardext or what ever it may be called.

BigRedGonzo