Duped by Cheap Chinese Knock-Off - Trying to make the best of a bad situation

[Ivor Davies]

Hi, due to a moment of madness I went and bought a cheap generic tablet from a Chinese online store. It calls itself the Samsung T950S, although Samsung has nothing to do with this tablet, the closest I can come to a brand name is in fact a MediaTek MT6592, which I think is the name of its processor. (You can check out the specs on the following link: http://valid.x86.fr/a/pkfhn5)

I saw the internal memory was 64Gb, which I thought was excellent, only to later discover that it was in fact partitioned into an internal memory of 4Gb and external phone storage of 64Gb. I'm currently trying to swap the internal and external memory allocations as per some instructions I found via google search (http://allroundnijia.blogspot.co.nz/2015/08/techhow-to-increase-internal-memory.html) . As I understand it this means (a) rooting the device, (b) installing and enabling SuperSU, and (c) modifying the vold.fstb file to swap around the internal and external memory allocations.

I should mention that there is no separate SD card installed, just one "hard drive" partioned into two lots, 1 4Gb and the other 59Gb.

I have so far managed to root the device and install SuperSu, but when I open this application I get a prompt saying the binaries need to be updated, once approved it tries to install the updated binaries and always fails. When I try to locate the vold.fstb file under /system/etc it's nowhere to be seen.

What I wanted to know is if the binary upgrade in SuperSU is affecting my ability to find and modify the vold.fstb file? Does this file even exist in this tablet? I have been poring over the android forums for ages and have come across some scary stuff about unpacking my boot.img, modifying the ramdisk, repacking and reflashing, but this stuff is way over my head.

If so I would appreciate some guidance on how to either successfully install the binaries so I can move on to swapping over the memory allocations, or suggestions for a different approach to changing the memory allocations so I can boost the internal memory up to at least 16Gb (preferably 32).

THANKS!


Technical specifications:

Exact device model : The Model Number in the System settings is "Samsung T950S" although again, this is not really a Samsung tablet but a cheap generic Chinese knock off (

).

Exact firmware version:

Android Security Patch Level: 2015-11-01

Baseband Version: MOLY.WR8.W1449.MD.WG.MP.V6.P13, 2016/01/06 10:34

Kernel Version: 3.10.72+ buildserver@buildserver1 #1 Wed Jan 6 17:16:31 CST 2016

Build number K960_vKB011B_20160105


- Exact Android version

Android 5.12


- Exact SuperSU version

SuperSU PseudoPro v2.65



Thanks again for your help.

 

[mikedt]

Can you read Chinese? ...and even then I don't think there's much information at all. Manufacturer is unknown. Mediatek MTK is the SoC it uses. Many cheapo and knock-off devices like this are partitioned in a really crappy way, and so often there's not a lot you can do about it, in the absence of specific manufacturer's or dev. community information about the device. It's a relic from 2.x verson Android, and is no longer required to be partitioned like that at all.

 

[Ivor Davies]

Haha! No, I can't read Chinese I'm afraid.

Last resort is trying to partition a separate physical SD card and try using that as my internal storage. There are a couple of youtube videos around on how to do that so hopefully I won't get it totally screwed up.

Thanks