Root A2SD in recovery?

[cableguynoe]

I'm pretty sure the answer is no... but i'll ask anyway.

I am using Ivans official 1.0 rom.

Supposed to have A2sd, but it did not work for me.

I was messing around in recovery, and option number 7 (Other) has
"Move Apps+dalv to SD"

Is that what i think it is? Would A2sd start working if i click on this?

Or what would happen. I dont want to try it without getting info on this option first.

 

[erisuser1]

I think that a2sd in Ivanmmj's Official 1.0 does not work, at least not automagically.

The menu item you are observing will move stuff from the /data partition (the app and app-private folder contents) onto you Ext{2,3} partition. However, since a2sd doesn't work "out of the box" for Ivanmmj's 1.0, this will "wreck" your Ivans install.

That menu item is useful if you are going from a non-a2sd ROM to one that supports it "out of the box."

You can safely experiment with it by first making a Nand backup before you run that menu item, and then if you like, do a Nand+ext backup afterwards. The latter will allow you to restore the Ext partition on the SD card (with your apps) using a Nand+ext restore.

It is possible that Ivanmmj's Official 1.0 can be fixed up to get a2sd working, but I haven't experimented with that yet.

eu1

 

[benso87]

I think that a2sd in Ivanmmj's Official 1.0 does not work, at least not automagically.

The menu item you are observing will move stuff from the /data partition (the app and app-private folder contents) onto you Ext{2,3} partition. However, since a2sd doesn't work "out of the box" for Ivanmmj's 1.0, this will "wreck" your Ivans install.

That menu item is useful if you are going from a non-a2sd ROM to one that supports it "out of the box."

You can safely experiment with it by first making a Nand backup before you run that menu item, and then if you like, do a Nand+ext backup afterwards. The latter will allow you to restore the Ext partition on the SD card (with your apps) using a Nand+ext restore.

It is possible that Ivanmmj's Official 1.0 can be fixed up to get a2sd working, but I haven't experimented with that yet.

eu1

I guess I'm a little late to this thread, but this seemed like a good place to bring this up.

I'm kind of confused about this, because on the xda thread about Ivan's 1.0, it says that A2SD is enabled and uses EXT3. I followed your instructions from this thread to try to get things set up, but when I look at my remaining storage after going through all these steps, it says something around 77 MB. I should also point out that I upgrade from EXT2 to EXT 3 (using "SD:ext2 to ext3" in the Partition SD card menu) before moving my apps and dalvik cache to the SD card. I don't remember where I read to do that, but it does seem to make sense in this context.

I've been looking around in the forums here and over at xda to try to figure out how to get this to work so I can feel safe to try out other ROMs without having to reinstall all my apps every time, but I haven't had any luck.

 

[andrizoid]

well you can always pull your apps and push them later.

adb pull /wherever/your/apps/are/stored /path/to/sdk/tools

adb remount

adb push ^^whatever fle you pulled /data/app


if you dont know what directories im referencing, i wouldnt recommend trying it

 

[Spencer_Moore]

using a2sd none of this should be neccesary. On reboot the utility is supposed to scan and move things to the partiton if they are not already there. If not in an ADB shell

su
#a2sd install

this will move everything to the partition if A2SD is installed correctly in the ROM which I am sure Ivan did.

 

[benso87]

well you can always pull your apps and push them later.

adb pull /wherever/your/apps/are/stored /path/to/sdk/tools

adb remount

adb push ^^whatever fle you pulled /data/app


if you dont know what directories im referencing, i wouldnt recommend trying it

I tried this, but I either don't know which directory holds the apps, or I screwed something else up. I used Root Explorer to come to the conclusion they must be stored in /data/app, then I saw you mentioned that above. Ha. I probably would've tried more, but I didn't want to risk messing anything up too much while the forum was down.

using a2sd none of this should be neccesary. On reboot the utility is supposed to scan and move things to the partiton if they are not already there. If not in an ADB shell

su
#a2sd install

this will move everything to the partition if A2SD is installed correctly in the ROM which I am sure Ivan did.

To clarify, are you saying all I should have to do is partition my SD card properly, then type those two commands using ADB, and it should take care of my A2SD problem on reboot?

 

[erisuser1]

using a2sd none of this should be neccesary. On reboot the utility is supposed to scan and move things to the partiton if they are not already there. If not in an ADB shell

su
#a2sd install

this will move everything to the partition if A2SD is installed correctly in the ROM which I am sure Ivan did.

Hi Spencer,

I just restored a (few-weeks old) Nandroid backup of Ivan's Official 1.0, and ran "a2sd". It complained about a few things

--- Checking ext filesystems
e2fsck: not found
cp: cannot stat '/data/app-private/*': No such file or directory
+++ Apps-to-SD successfully enabled

Then the market app crashed (I suppose that might be expected since you are temporarily making /data/app unavailable - even if it is only for a fraction of a second).

On reboot, it is looping on the "HTC quitely brilliant" screen.

adbd is up - I can log in and get a shell - but the /system/sd mount does not seem to be happening.

I'll spend some more time with it and report my results in this thread - that's what Nandroid backups are useful for!


eu1

 

[erisuser1]

Thought that it might be an ext3 problem, so I

- booted into recovery
- wiped /data
- wiped SD:ext
- manually downconverted to ext2 ( w/ mke2fs )
- performed Nandroid restore of Ivanmmj Official 1.0 OC
- rebooted
(everything OK so far)
- ran "a2sd install" under adb shell

then.... same behavior as reported above (script reports success, Market crashes, and on reboot the phone loops at the "HTC quietly brilliant" splash. Also, in this case, the ext2 filesystem is not mounted at /system/sd.


Note that manually mounting the ext2 partition (from an adb shell) while the "bootloop" is taking place seems to rectify the problem.


Rats. Sort of suggests that the Ivanmmj Official 2.0 "a2sd" functionality is broken, at least "out of the box".


I can fool around to see if the mount can be hacked in, but I think that init.rc needs to be modified in the boot image. (I'm not sure about that last point, but I think that is the case).


eu1