Root Moving folders to the SD card on the Ally? (ext2/3/4 partition preferably)

[Christiebunny]

Running a rooted Ally, velocity 1.2 ROM, amonra recovery; busybox and bash shells as well as default; and I've got a 32GB microSD, with a 5GB ext3 and a 1GB swap partition setup on it (p2 & p3, p1's a 26GB FAT32).

I've been able to move a few apps to the fat32 partition on the SD card, with apps2SD but I'd like a little more flexibility and room, so.... Is it possible to move any of the following to those partitions?

/dalvik-cache
/cache
/data/data
/data/app
/system/app

Simply moving them and "ln -s"ing them doesn't seem to work, I tried that with the FAT32 partition (25GB), and lose permissions with it, too. My best guess is, it's not mounting the partition early enough in the boot process, adb catlog was giving me 'can't find dalvik-cache' errors.

So, my questions are:

1. Is it possible to move any of those, or all of them, to that partition? And if so, how? ideally i'd like the caches on the swap partion and the apps and /data/data on the ext3.

2. How can I reliably mount those partitions, and do so early enough in the boot cycle for them to be read at the right time in the boot cycle?

less important puzzles:
3. How do I set bash as my default shell?

4. I've been told android doesn't use an fstab, but a vold.fstab instead, yet I've seen both on the system.. what's up?

5. Failing any of this, is there a way to easilly shuffle the partition boundaries around to make /data a little larger?

 

[Biotic]

Alot of curious questions...
Simply apps are the only android based software of the system that can be moved to the sdcard on the ally device how ever possible on other devices. For instance in order to install android 3.0 to a kindle, it must run off the sdcard but thats just an example of android flexibility. It just all depends on the device capabilities but the ally does not have great memory usage

 

[Christiebunny]

Alot of curious questions...
Simply apps are the only android based software of the system that can be moved to the sdcard on the ally device how ever possible on other devices. For instance in order to install android 3.0 to a kindle, it must run off the sdcard but thats just an example of android flexibility. It just all depends on the device capabilities but the ally does not have great memory usage

Oddd, i've got a friend that claims he's got /dalvik-cache moved (though he won't tell me how so i'm suspicious), how do I move the apps? just ln -s? and is that /data/app ot /data/app and /system/app both?

 

[Biotic]

The cache is done by the rom itself and init.d scripts their called. You have no control over this, only the rom does (which the developer had to integrate ofcourse)
/data/app are the apps that can be moved to sdcard. /system/app stay on the memory device the system is installed on.

 

[Christiebunny]

The cache is done by the rom itself and init.d scripts their called. You have no control over this, only the rom does (which the developer had to integrate ofcourse)
/data/app are the apps that can be moved to sdcard. /system/app stay on the memory device the system is installed on.

I'll have to see if I can move/symlink /data/apps then, Icould have swore it was possible to move /data/dalvik-cache too, oh well, that's not as big an issue to me.

would you know how to set the ext2 partition to mount in vold.fstab, like the sdcard does? i can manually mount it, but i'd like it automounted, especially if I can do that early in the boot process so it sees the apps there. I tried /etc/fstab, I figured that'd load before vold.fstab does, since it mounts /system and the rest, but I couldn't get the change to stick.

 

[dwarfplanet9]

Have you checked out the links2sd app? It moves apps to your ext partition, puts in the symbolic links, and mounts the ext partition at boot time. Its working pretty well for me.
Velocity 1.2
32 GB micro SD

 

[Christiebunny]

Have you checked out the links2sd app? It moves apps to your ext partition, puts in the symbolic links, and mounts the ext partition at boot time. Its working pretty well for me.
Velocity 1.2
32 GB micro SD

I haven't, no, thank you! I'll look into it, especially since I'm also running velocity 1.2 w/ a 32GB microSD

 

[Christiebunny]

Link2SD does exactly what I'd hoped, it works awesome so far! although in hindsight maybe making an 8GB ext3 partition for apps was a bit overboard

 

[Biotic]

Link2SD does exactly what I'd hoped, it works awesome so far! although in hindsight maybe making an 8GB ext3 partition for apps was a bit overboard

Just abit 0.o lol

 

[dots]

Moving dalvik-cache to sdcard ext partition is possible. I've done it back in the 2.1 days when i had an ally. Granted it wasn't the most stable idea but was possible. Used Darktermors apps2sd script.

See: [Script][A2SD] Darktremor 2.7.5.3 Beta 04 [N1] (01/29/2011) - xda-developers

This does what link2sd does plus more, just no GUI.

 

[Christiebunny]

I shrunk the ext down to 1GB, I know it's more than I need, but I'll probably find something to fill it, just like everywhere else

Have 23MB free on the internal, could probably free up more, but there's several apps I wasn't sure about moving, like handcent, google maps, and other things with widgets.

I thought about moving dalvik-cache, but it seems lins2sd does that automatically for the files it moves to SD, anyways, so I'm not gonna touch it.

Thanks to everyone for the help though, although it's a tiny bit slower to boot now, it's SO much nicer than it was ... now if only the interal storage was an actual microSD I could replace, I'd put in a class10 4GB or something *joking*