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

Root A2SD Confusssion

I have been reading as much as I can about this, but I wanted to ask for some input because I am still cloudy on it.

Here is the setup:

Metro ascend with a fresh install of icarus 1.1. Loving it.

I went through the setup with my factory card (2GB) with a 512 ext2 partition for a2sd, and the remaining space for fat32.

I now want to replace that 2 GB with my 16 GB card, but after reading all over the forums here I am still not sure the best way to do this.

Would someone throw a droid newb a bone?

First off, this is incidental, but make sure that the 'New' Card you get is a class 4 so it's 'Fast' Enough to handle you switching the Dalvik partition over to it. I say it's incidental because chances are very high that just the 16Gigs on the shelf are Class 4 and not something you need to worry about. I upgraded to a 4 then to an 8 before early on, before I even knew about the class 4 thing, and they were just right off the shelf, just a comment, but don't worry. It may say like "High speed" or something on the package.

Now, in the past I would have told you to use Linux partition the card, BUT through some problems I had and Tokenpoke doing some research. It was determined that IF the partitioning is NOT done on the phone, through ClockWork, it won't work, since the phone keeps track what the partition should be, so make sure to do the partitioning on the phone.

FIRST: Take the new card and go ahead and format the card, you can do that in windows, no problem

Second: Power off the phone, and Vol.up/Answer call/Power - Hold until ClockWork Recovery pops up, as you probably know will take 5-10 seconds.

After in CWR (oh when the phone is OFF, go ahead and put the new formatted card into the phone).

Now, while in recovery. You will go to the partition option and set it up as you like. I "THINK" That Tokenpoke told me something about trying to make the a2sd partition 1Gig or above caused problems. I'm sure he will see this and give some comments, so that will round off my comments and
you'll be good to go.

So, let's just say, you format it at 512 and 0. Now it has an EXT partition (Linux partition).

Now, using the computer, you can transfer over files or whatever from the old to the new.

BIG THING: REMEMBER-The stuff that "WINDOWS" sees is on the FAT32 partition, so all your pics, songs, etc.

IF you were using A2SD before 2 options: 1. Use Titanium backup before starting, batch backup all your apps, then just make sure to copy that folder over to the new card. 2. (Untested option), Using Linux (Ubuntu or something), Just Ubuntu you can boot from a CD and run the OS from a CD for just these simple tasks. That will be able to "See" the EXT partition and you can directly copy that right over.

ABSOLUTE WORST CASE HERE: Gotta reinstall the apps. I've done it alot, if you dont have many, the no biggie.

The use of Titanium Backup is probably the best option, easiest too. When you copy over stuff from the old to the new, just get that folder, then I'm pretty sure you can even do a 'batch' restore from Titanium and restore all your apps.

I'm sorry, I know this response could have been a little more tidy, I was working on it on and off for an hour kept getting pulled away. So I hope that it is still legible and makes sense to you.

The important thing is doing the partitioning, etc from CWR, not in Linux. Super long story short - I did that and the phone thought they should be the other size, and it got into a loop, I had to totally erase everything.

Then Tokenpoke confirmed that the phone keeps track and upon boot checks it against what you really have and if not, code loop, never to return...lol

It's def. not nearly as complicated as it may sound. Plus you have your old card to put back in and be back to normal if you make a mistake or something.

That thing I mentioned about making the a2sd partition over a gig messing things up and not working, was just part of a quick conversation we had on the subject, but really like 512 should be pretty good. You can try to go a gig if that's what you were planning and it's possible to have it work out.

As we were discussing yesterday, there are a couple "Versions" of this phone in terms of hardware (cost based, buying parts cheap here and there), so I don't know about this but there are some phones will produce different results as others with some things.

So go for it. I probably made it sound a bit more complicated that it really is.....just put that sucker in there, do the partitioning IN CWR, then copy the shit back on to it from the old, you won't be able to do that on the EXT partition in windows, if you have Linux, do that, if not, just before you start, batch backup your apps using "TITANIUM BACKUP" Free on the market. Make sure you copy over the Tit. bkup folder. Install Titanium backup. and after all is done and batch recover all your apps. assuming you have quite a few, otherwise, just install them again or whatever....

Good luck, again sorry, alot of babble, just a busy morning and kept coming and going....but if you have ANY QUESTIONS or have ANY PROBLEMS, just Post (Best so we can all see) or PM if it's somethign small.

OK...Good luck.....Jeff / Spyder
 
Hello, i think i need help.
I did the whole us, a2sd check, a2sd zipalign, a2sd reinstall commans but i think i hasn't helped with the transfering of my apps to my sd card.

I have:
Internal 198(107m free)
Sd card 1.74gb(833mb)
SD card (a2sd) 239mb(154mb free)

I did all these commands yet my internal battery is still getting drained
I use cache cleaners so i don't think it's cache

Anyone knows how to fix this?
 
First off, this is incidental, but make sure that the 'New' Card you get is a class 4 so it's 'Fast' Enough to handle you switching the Dalvik partition over to it. I say it's incidental because chances are very high that just the 16Gigs on the shelf are Class 4 and not something you need to worry about. I upgraded to a 4 then to an 8 before early on, before I even knew about the class 4 thing, and they were just right off the shelf, just a comment, but don't worry. It may say like "High speed" or something on the package.

Now, in the past I would have told you to use Linux partition the card, BUT through some problems I had and Tokenpoke doing some research. It was determined that IF the partitioning is NOT done on the phone, through ClockWork, it won't work, since the phone keeps track what the partition should be, so make sure to do the partitioning on the phone.

FIRST: Take the new card and go ahead and format the card, you can do that in windows, no problem

Second: Power off the phone, and Vol.up/Answer call/Power - Hold until ClockWork Recovery pops up, as you probably know will take 5-10 seconds.

After in CWR (oh when the phone is OFF, go ahead and put the new formatted card into the phone).

Now, while in recovery. You will go to the partition option and set it up as you like. I "THINK" That Tokenpoke told me something about trying to make the a2sd partition 1Gig or above caused problems. I'm sure he will see this and give some comments, so that will round off my comments and
you'll be good to go.

So, let's just say, you format it at 512 and 0. Now it has an EXT partition (Linux partition).

Now, using the computer, you can transfer over files or whatever from the old to the new.

BIG THING: REMEMBER-The stuff that "WINDOWS" sees is on the FAT32 partition, so all your pics, songs, etc.

IF you were using A2SD before 2 options: 1. Use Titanium backup before starting, batch backup all your apps, then just make sure to copy that folder over to the new card. 2. (Untested option), Using Linux (Ubuntu or something), Just Ubuntu you can boot from a CD and run the OS from a CD for just these simple tasks. That will be able to "See" the EXT partition and you can directly copy that right over.

ABSOLUTE WORST CASE HERE: Gotta reinstall the apps. I've done it alot, if you dont have many, the no biggie.

The use of Titanium Backup is probably the best option, easiest too. When you copy over stuff from the old to the new, just get that folder, then I'm pretty sure you can even do a 'batch' restore from Titanium and restore all your apps.

I'm sorry, I know this response could have been a little more tidy, I was working on it on and off for an hour kept getting pulled away. So I hope that it is still legible and makes sense to you.

The important thing is doing the partitioning, etc from CWR, not in Linux. Super long story short - I did that and the phone thought they should be the other size, and it got into a loop, I had to totally erase everything.

Then Tokenpoke confirmed that the phone keeps track and upon boot checks it against what you really have and if not, code loop, never to return...lol

It's def. not nearly as complicated as it may sound. Plus you have your old card to put back in and be back to normal if you make a mistake or something.

That thing I mentioned about making the a2sd partition over a gig messing things up and not working, was just part of a quick conversation we had on the subject, but really like 512 should be pretty good. You can try to go a gig if that's what you were planning and it's possible to have it work out.

As we were discussing yesterday, there are a couple "Versions" of this phone in terms of hardware (cost based, buying parts cheap here and there), so I don't know about this but there are some phones will produce different results as others with some things.

So go for it. I probably made it sound a bit more complicated that it really is.....just put that sucker in there, do the partitioning IN CWR, then copy the shit back on to it from the old, you won't be able to do that on the EXT partition in windows, if you have Linux, do that, if not, just before you start, batch backup your apps using "TITANIUM BACKUP" Free on the market. Make sure you copy over the Tit. bkup folder. Install Titanium backup. and after all is done and batch recover all your apps. assuming you have quite a few, otherwise, just install them again or whatever....

Good luck, again sorry, alot of babble, just a busy morning and kept coming and going....but if you have ANY QUESTIONS or have ANY PROBLEMS, just Post (Best so we can all see) or PM if it's somethign small.

OK...Good luck.....Jeff / Spyder


I got it all hooked up. Big thanks for that reply. Tit BU saved me on this as far as getting back my stuff/data.

The whole process was pretty straight forward, but I made a CW image before I tried just to be safe.

I also used a 1 GB ext2 partition for a2sd which is working without a problem.

I will have to do this again in a couple days because my card is a class 2 :/
Although all seems fine, I have not moved my Dalvik. I will wait to get a class 10 before I try that.

Internal: 198MB(131 MB Free)
SD Card: 14.98GB (14.23 GB Free)
SD Card (a2sd) 959 MB (901 Free) - this should go down after moving Dalvik
 
Hello, i think i need help.
I did the whole us, a2sd check, a2sd zipalign, a2sd reinstall commans but i think i hasn't helped with the transfering of my apps to my sd card.

I have:
Internal 198(107m free)
Sd card 1.74gb(833mb)
SD card (a2sd) 239mb(154mb free)

I did all these commands yet my internal battery is still getting drained
I use cache cleaners so i don't think it's cache

Anyone knows how to fix this?

Did you move Dalvik Cache to the SD card?
 
Did you move Dalvik Cache to the SD card?

No I have not moved it to sd. After running the a2sd check command it says that Dalvik is only 32mb. I still think I have low internal memory left. I'm using the stock sd, should I move Dalvik to sd?
 
No I have not moved it to sd. After running the a2sd check command it says that Dalvik is only 32mb. I still think I have low internal memory left. I'm using the stock sd, should I move Dalvik to sd?

That will free up a lot of internal memory, but like the post above states you need a faster card for the delvik cache to work well on the SD card.

a2sd looks like it is working for you, I can see space being taken up on your a2sd partition (you can run a2sd check from a terminal to verify). But since dalvik is still running on internal you will see more space being occupied.
 
That will free up a lot of internal memory, but like the post above states you need a faster card for the delvik cache to work well on the SD card.

a2sd looks like it is working for you, I can see space being taken up on your a2sd partition. But since dalvik is still running on internal you will see more space being occupied.

Would it be ok to move the Dalvik to sd using the stock sd? Would it have any consequences or affect anything?
 
Would it be ok to move the Dalvik to sd using the stock sd? Would it have any consequences or affect anything?

YMMV. I could not say.

according to the a2sd help file you can move this back and forth. I suppose you could move it back if you notice any major issues.

Just make another clockwork or nandroid backup. If all goes south just reload that image. (you could also tit bu it to be redundant which is not a bad idea)

usually stock sdcards are very good. I think the stock in the ascend is a class 6
 
Something isn't right with my phone.

I followed the steps above about checking A2SD and reinstalling it and moving the Dalvik cache over to the SD card etc. but something is wrong. After doing all this I still only have a very small amount free on the internal memory.

I even installed A2SDGUI and look:

snap20110402195012.png


snap20110402195150.png


snap20110402195203.png


snap20110402195444.png


So as you can see that A2SDGUI seems to show that I did everything correctly (apps on SD ... Dalvik Cache on SD) yet I still only have 32.6 MB free internally?
 
VERY IMPORTANT!....

IF YOU MOVE DALVIK TO SD DO NOT PULL YOUR CARD WHILE PHONE IS ON! IT WILL CRASH!


fulci- do what i just said not to do... if your dalvik is really moved your phone will crash, don't worry. pull the battery and wait ten seconds, replace the card and reboot, it will work fine.

also, when you did a2sd reinstall, did your phone reboot. what terminal are you using too.
 
I downloaded two Terminal programs (both free). One was Terminal Emulator (ZTA Technologies, Inc) and the other was Android Terminal Emulator (Jack Palevich)

Why two? The first one (or TE for short) crashed after three attempts to simply load it. So I gave up and used the second one (or ATE for short) and it seemed to work fine.

If I recall the phone did not auto re-boot / shut-down when I did the re-install but it did auto re-boot after moving the Dalvik cache.

Please note that my memory was the same (as in seen in the Titanium Backup pic above). By the same I mean that was what it said both before and then after doing the stuff in this thread (which I did in an attempt to free up some free space on my internal memory).

So ... you said to pull out the card WHILE the phone was running to see if it would crash. Well what you wrote was very clear but I guess I had a lot on my mind heh

I did something different.

I turned the phone off and while it was off (but the battery still inside) I took out the SDcard. Then I turned it on. The phone booted up (or seemed to boot up fine) but when I swiped it to open it (or unlock it) I got a "Sorry! Process android.process.acore is not responding" and then given the option to FORCE CLOSE or WAIT so I clicked on WAIT and it seemed to boot OK but my home screen looked all "funny" with missing dock (at the bottom) and missing app icons etc. so I turned it off ... pulled the battery ... stuck the SDcard back in ... put the battery back in ... then turned it on.

Only it did the same thing!

So I pulled the battery again (and just to be safe took out the SD card and put it back in ... making sure it "clicked" into place) and turned it on and again ... it's all messed up.

So sigh I dunno WTF is wrong now.

I was able to make a call from my contact list but my Home menu(s) are all messed up and I seem to have missing apps now (it looks like I just have the apps that Icarus 1.1 came with).

WTF !!!

Oh and the Android Market is not working now.

Sigh. Maybe I should just re-install Icarus 1.1 fresh ...
 
I downloaded two Terminal programs (both free). One was Terminal Emulator (ZTA Technologies, Inc) and the other was Android Terminal Emulator (Jack Palevich)

Why two? The first one (or TE for short) crashed after three attempts to simply load it. So I gave up and used the second one (or ATE for short) and it seemed to work fine.

If I recall the phone did not auto re-boot / shut-down when I did the re-install but it did auto re-boot after moving the Dalvik cache.

Please note that my memory was the same (as in seen in the Titanium Backup pic above). By the same I mean that was what it said both before and then after doing the stuff in this thread (which I did in an attempt to free up some free space on my internal memory).

So ... you said to pull out the card WHILE the phone was running to see if it would crash. Well what you wrote was very clear but I guess I had a lot on my mind heh

I did something different.

I turned the phone off and while it was off (but the battery still inside) I took out the SDcard. Then I turned it on. The phone booted up (or seemed to boot up fine) but when I swiped it to open it (or unlock it) I got a "Sorry! Process android.process.acore is not responding" and then given the option to FORCE CLOSE or WAIT so I clicked on WAIT and it seemed to boot OK but my home screen looked all "funny" with missing dock (at the bottom) and missing app icons etc. so I turned it off ... pulled the battery ... stuck the SDcard back in ... put the battery back in ... then turned it on.

Only it did the same thing!

So I pulled the battery again (and just to be safe took out the SD card and put it back in ... making sure it "clicked" into place) and turned it on and again ... it's all messed up.

So sigh I dunno WTF is wrong now.

I was able to make a call from my contact list but my Home menu(s) are all messed up and I seem to have missing apps now (it looks like I just have the apps that Icarus 1.1 came with).

WTF !!!

Oh and the Android Market is not working now.

Sigh. Maybe I should just re-install Icarus 1.1 fresh ...

sorry you had so much trouble. boot cwm and try fixing permissions. maybe this will work.
when you turned off the phone you messed up. on boot it tried building the dalvik cache only to find it missing and built a new one.

on the up side what you tell me now is that all apps were in fact on sd (and market moved there too).

we can try something (i have never done this before but i doubt anything will go any worse).... don't wipe your phone, just the dalvik and just reinstall icarus but pull your card before booting the first time.

if it boots fine then go to market and get the second TE you got that worked (same on i use) open it type:
su
a2sd nocache

this will make the flag to move dalvik to the phone but it's already on there so it will now ignore the cache on the sd.

from here we have two choices, try to pull the apps already on the sd (really iffy) or move the contents of the fat32 part of your card to pc and format the card from either the phone (not cwm) settings in sd and storage or format the card using the pc and put your stuff back on.


side note: have you seen any threads dedicated to getting market back on if it disappears? a friend found a way to do it without reflashing last night.
 
I just blew it all out and reformatted the SDcard and re-installed Icarus 1.1

It worked. I just got it up and going and I'm downloading all my apps now *sigh*
 
Let us know how it worked out. I hope everything went like it is supposed to. :) If not, one of us will help you get through it. There is a wealth of knowledge here that we are happy to share. And every problem gives even more knowledge to help someone in the future. All of us are learning.
 
I just blew it all out and reformatted the SDcard and re-installed Icarus 1.1

It worked. I just got it up and going and I'm downloading all my apps now *sigh*


Yea, a lot of times, rather than try to tape this and Band-Aid that, it's more comfortable to just totall re-install, start nice and fresh. Only downside, is manually reinstalling the apps, which I have done myself several times. Actually when I was having severe problems, I actually had a handwritten list of apps, to just go right thru in the market....LOL.

I have only 1 questions - I assume that you 'Formatted the card' in Windows. Are you sure that it formatted the entire card, and didn't leave the EXT (Linux Partition) alone.

IF you put the card in the PC, go to 'Computer' Right click, Manage

At the bottom middle you'll see the card. Now since Windows cannot "Understand" the EXT partition, it will just say "Unknown partition"

Normally if you have a card, you want to format, and it has an EXT part. on it. You need to go there and delete that unknown partition, then format.

Otherwise, say you had an 8 GIG card w/ a 1Gig A2SD partition, and just tossed it into the computer, it would format at onlly 7 GB, since that other partition needs to be deleted or removed, etc.

It sounds like all went well, but just some advice. Turn the phone off, and take a look at the card, see what's up. Like I said, Start, Computer, Right click, Manage --

On the Left is a column of options, you will see Storage and right under that, Disk Management. It will give you the sizing/format type/etc of every storage component in there at the time.

So since you have Icarus reinstalled, you should definately see the FAT32 partition (regular SD card stuff), and also an EXT 2 Partition, which will say "Unknown partition"

The only thing to look for is for some crazy reason you have a SECOND EXT Part. Left over from last time. In that case, you don't have much choice, but to clear them out and start over.

I can help you do that easily, but I won't continue this long long post with all that, till I find out what's going on with it??? Let me know.

Just as Anduiril said, you will DEFINATLY get the help you need...

OK....Take a peek at what's up on the card and let us know...

Take cares....Jeff / Spyder
 
lol, you should have been there jeff..

we were trying to avoid formatting in cwm because of the previous experience of that making the card unreadable to windows.

he has no card reader and could not format the card via usb to pc.

last time i formatted in cwm i could not read my card on my pc card reader but apparently it worked this time.

oh fulci- did you make the new partition? that's when i was able to read the card on pc again, after the partition. just tried it.
 
lol, you should have been there jeff..

we were trying to avoid formatting in cwm because of the previous experience of that making the card unreadable to windows.

he has no card reader and could not format the card via usb to pc.

last time i formatted in cwm i could not read my card on my pc card reader but apparently it worked this time.

oh fulci- did you make the new partition? that's when i was able to read the card on pc again, after the partition. just tried it.

Yea, that sounds like a real catch 22....LOL....I just saw some cheap card readers to USB to plug right into the PC....

Also, I think it was Anduiril that actually tried formatting with CW and sure enough it was in EXT, just like we though.

So I guess it worked out in the end?? I'm a little unsure how you guys got the EXT off of there before formating? Otherwise, it'll format, but only up to the size w/o EXT....

LOL....like I said it is def. a Catch22 without a doubt
I'm curious how this ends up....let me know....take care...Jeff
 
Yes we were worried about how best to format it. I don't have an adapter so plugging the card directly into the computer was not an option.

I was trying to format it while in the phone but connected to the computer via USB.

Now I run Linux Mint (well I change the distro up from time to time) in VirtualBox (Win7 host) but it wouldn't recognize my phone. Could have been the way VirtualBox handles USB pass-through (not sure). I was going to format it with GParted. Then I downloaded the newest GParted LiveCD but that didn't seem to work either. It would not see the phone. I tried to format it through Windows but it reported 12.9GB which sounded a bit low which told me it wasn't formating the EXT partition (it has been 2GB and this is a 16GB card).

In the end it was actually very simple LOL

I just booted the phone into Clockwork and did a format there and that wiped it clean.

I then booted the phone normal and Windows reported a size greater than 12.9GB (I forget what now) and so I copied over the Icarus 1.1 mod zip file and just followed the instillation instructions verbatim. Only this time I decided to make the EXT 1GB instead of 2GB

I just took this picture (this was what you were asking for):

microsdhccardinfo.jpg


As you can see it worked A-OK

I'm still confused about something though LOL

I got "worried" that something was "wrong" with my phone. I noticed that I only had about 32MB free on the internal memory and my phone was acting up if you will ... being very slow and very laggy. I have no idea why. I got to thinking though that it was because I didn't have enough free internal memory and so that started me on this thread. I followed the directions but I still only had 32MB free and that was after trying to move the Dalvik cache to the micro SDHC card. Then I followed tokes advice only I goofed and did it wrong and my phone got all ****ed up LOL

I haven't had much time with the phone since redoing everything but it seems OKAY now. I reinstalled all of my apps and it doesn't seem overly slow or laggy. I admit there are a few I didn't install but then again I think there were a few I installed now I never had.

Right now Titanium Backup says the following:

snap20110403151622.png


So I have more free internal memory than before (before it was 32GB and now it's like double that) but doesn't it still seem lower than it should be?

I just know the phone seems OK now and not all laggy like it was before (and who knows now why it was like that). I mean it was getting to the point of almost being unusable it was so laggy. It's not like that now.

Technology is so kewl yet such a pain-in-the-ass LOL
 
For sure looks like things are going in the right direction. Now I don't have a TON of apps on, and I have the Dalvik on the card, and my internal memory is like 160-170?

Gimmi another day to look over this and I'll follow up...

How do you like the a2sd GUI by the way?

Take care...Jeff
 
i was going to flash icarus back tonight but i got in a fight with my bro so i have no usb crd still.

i do, however, remember that the last time i flashed titbu was giving me weird readings. it showed two a2sd parts with may card in and one seemed to be to the phones internal sd card. my main storage was 120free and the odd a2sd was down to 1, literally 1. i never looked into it though as i flashed cm7 that day and later bricked my spare. (need the freakin usb to flash it back to stock).
 
How do you like the a2sd GUI by the way?
Well I installed it on my phone before it "crashed" and I had to re-do everything. I have since not installed it on my new clean working installation of Icarus 1.1

It seemed buggy and would crash (before) so that makes me leery of installing it again. Then again I think my phone was sort of messed up somehow before I seriously messed it up so the instability of the a2sd GUI might have been my phone's fault.

Maybe I should try to re-install it now ...

Oh nevermind. I read more about it and apparently you have to have some scripts installed and this and that and no wonder it wasn't working right. It sounds too involved and complicated and my phone seems to be OK now so **** it. I'm not touching it LOL
 
Back
Top Bottom