• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

Root Is there a solution better than Link2SD?

ShapeShifter499

Android Enthusiast
Apr 3, 2015
376
262
I have a large sd and I use Link2SD to use the sd card to store my apps. This requires two partitions which is cumbersome when my phone uses the smaller first partition for photos and downloads. My roundabout solution has been to bind mount these to the second partition but this leads to more issues. Do you guys know of a better solution? I'd much rather have one large partition to store everything. I was thinking of just using one partition and bind mounting a folder inside to the location Link2SD would expect but would this work?
 
You could look into Folder Mount.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.devasque.fmount

I agree the two partition thing is awkward. It would be nice if it could create like a dynamically allocated virtual drive to use.

I've been doing well with just moving what I can without having the second partition, moving large ext data and obb files with L2SD and large apks with stock app manager when possible.
 
  • Like
Reactions: El Presidente
Upvote 0
Last edited by a moderator:
  • Like
Reactions: ShapeShifter499
Upvote 0
i know there is a script floating around that we used to use to do that before link2SD but it comes with it own misc problems as well, so i wouldn't say its better. kinda makes you miss ICS with a simple volt.stab modification.

hey i found this in the F3 forums
http://androidforums.com/threads/increase-available-gigabytes.946334/
Thank you for the link. I was able to get the SD card mounted as Internal Storage. However I was unable to figure out how to get 'vold' to properly mount and see the now unused internal /data partition so I could see it when I plugged my device in via USB to my PC. Instead I was able to have it mounted in place of the /data/sdext2 for Link2SD (which it registered properly) in case I ever wanted to link apps to the true internal storage for speed or in case of low storage. Don't think I'll ever run out of storage any time soon though :)
 

Attachments

  • Screenshot_2015-12-26-11-34-20.png
    Screenshot_2015-12-26-11-34-20.png
    69.4 KB · Views: 144
Last edited:
Upvote 0
Upvote 0

That isn't going to work for the LG Volt. All the fstab lines are bundled inside the 'boot.img' within the ramdisk under a file called fstab.x5. That file is equivalent to "fstab.hardware" as they put it in other tutorials. It seems the only reason the file 'vold.fstab' is there is to assure the external_SD is mounted properly after boot for when/if you insert a Micro SD card after boot. My problem now is getting 'vold' to properly register the internal storage so I can see it when I plug the Volt into a computer. Such a small a amount of space compared to my Micro SD card that I don't really mind.

There is another way, if I remember right, it is using link2sd but you also modify vold.fstab. You just add in the mount point for the sd partion, and remove the link2sd script. And it works much better than link2sd. I had done it originally, I just haven't gone back to it yet, since I upgraded to v6.

I modified the fstab.x5 file inside the ramdisk under boot.img to mount the former userdata partition under /data/sdext2 so link2sd could see it. I just havent been able to get 'vold' to register it so I could see it over MTP on my computer. 'Vold' just segfaults and I'm not 100% sure why.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Deleted User
Upvote 0

BEST TECH IN 2023

We've been tracking upcoming products and ranking the best tech since 2007. Thanks for trusting our opinion: we get rewarded through affiliate links that earn us a commission and we invite you to learn more about us.

Smartphones