Root Benefits of running from sd?

Entayan said:

Hello, I was debating installing my rom on my sd card but am unsure whether this will make the rest of the sd card unusable. The main reason for this is because I want the apps to completely install on to the sd card (not sure if this is feasible, but seems to make logical sense) because obviously the main storage is probably not enough. I don't know if the app2sd could solve this problem or not, but I thought I would ask. Anyways, as I was saying before, I would like to know if I can flash a rom (default or otherwise) onto my sd, and still have extra storage for random other things (because I don't think that any rom should be taking 32 gigs). I don't know if I should partition my sd either, or leave it as is.
Anyways, I apologise for the scattered elements of my question, but I am fairly new at this and don't know exactly what I'm doing. If someone could give me at least a few tips, or a point in the right direction or to the right information, then that would be greatly appreciated!

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Hi,

***EDIT*** Just a quick explanation of this to clarify what you were asking before: This phone has three main partitions to worry about:

System (256 megs, Used for the ROM)
Data (128 megs, around 100 megs free. Used for your apps and their information + Cache. Gets full REAL fast).
Cache (50 megs, Used to download apps from the play store. doesn't seem to be an issue as of now unless you download 5 apps totalling more than 50 megs at the same time, in which case it craps out royally)

The ROM itself resides on System and has sufficient space to run on it. The important one to move to SD would be the data partition. These steps below are to do just that! This will also isolate your SD card into two sections, so you don't lose the use of your SD card, just a small portion of it (Depending on its size. On my 16GB card, I still have around 13 gigs free after using 1 gig for App2SD)

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Here's a step by step on how to configure your data to be on SD card (Also known as Darktremor's App2SD). This is considering you have a large enough and fast enough SD card for a secondary data partition and that you're running my custom ROM.

First of all, you need to partition your SD card. To do so, I suggest using the Minitool partition software.

You need to seperate your SD card into two partitions. I suggest putting it in a card reader and not doing this from your phone. Partitions are as such:

Main partition: FAT32 (All your space except 1 GB, leave the 1GB unallocated)
Secondary partition: EXT4 (the 1GB space that's unallocated, I wouldn't go more as it might cause instability)

Set both partitions as PRIMARY, very important. Not as logical.

Once that's done, pop the card in your phone and boot it up.

The following is a little more complicated and you will need the use of adb or the Play store app called Android Terminal.

So either go to a command prompt and type "adb shell" or fire up Android terminal from your phone. Once in either, type the following:

su
a2sd check

Look for the following text:

Block Device - [ԣ

Entayan said:

Thanks, Karendar! I would really like to try that but I would still like to clarify a few things:

1. I know you said that you have to partition your sd card; do you know of any good programs that can do that? I know that I was trying to partition an sd card before, for service as a ubuntu boot disk, and I ended up giving up because I couldn't find a way. I know there's a ton of programs that 'flip the removable bit' but that doesn't seem to do anything. This is something I can look into as well, but I was just wondering if you had any particular insight into it

Minitool partition Wizard, does wonders and I use it for all my SD card needs.


2. You said that I will need to be using your custom rom, is that your custom Shine Plus ROM R4 with OC Kernel? I just want to clarify which one I should be using before I . . . erm . . . use it

Yep! The one and only. It's a year of random work left and right from a bunch of people all crammed into one ROM.

3. Will it still be able to be attached via usb to the computer? The phone unmounts the sd whenever you use it as a usb device, but I am uncertain whether it would just unmount one of the partitions or the whole thing. That could pose a problem if I ever want to use that feature.

Mounting the SD still works fine, you just lose access to your apps temporarily when you do (But it does work considering they're separate partitions)

Thanks again for all the help; I really appreciate it! I know that I have a lot of questions, but I just want to make extra sure that I understand all that's going on before I embark on this endeavor

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See answers in red. WOO!

Entayan said:

Thanks so much for the solution, Karendar! I got it working on the test version 4 of your custom rom, and I have never had anything go smoother I tried it at first on version 3, but it didn't seem to work (kept insisting that I use an ext3 or ext2 partition instead of ext4). Oh well, it works now and I am well pleased

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Yeah, reason it didn't work with v3 is because it didn't have a custom kernel... I recompiled the kernel with Ext4 support to use with app2sd.

I thought I would comment on this a bit late. I was running the custom rom for a while but never bothered with app2sd until I ran out of internal space and everything kept crashing. I haven't got the corrupt cache and random reboots once every couple weeks either. Wish I had done this sooner. Easy to do and my phone works much better. One note is it worked like absolute garbage for the first 20 mins or so. I thought I made it worse but I assume it was slow while it copied all of my apps over to the sd card and rebuilt cache.

Not sure if related to this or not but I had my SD card die on me. It does kinda suck because I had to start over from scratch on a new sd card. Don't know if it would be related to running everything from sd or if it was just it's time to die.

Could you tell me what kind of SD card it was?
I just bought a 32GB Sandisk Ultra so I don't want to risk it if it has the potential to mess up more premium cards.
I had a budget 2GB die on me recently for unrelated reasons, so I'm wondering whether yours was as budget as my old one or something more premium like a sandisk, which should be reliable and last a while, in which case app2sd would be a likely culprit.

Not too sure what it is. All it says on it is 8gb micro sd hc. it came in a phone i bought. It may have already been used too.