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Root Don't want to ride the turquoise skateboard!

TheOnlyRick

TheOnlyRick

Newbie
A few months ago I:

Rooted my HTC Desire
Installed CM7
Formatted my SD card with EXT3
Was happy


Today I put a new blank EXT2 SD card in. I got the skateboarding guy. After a half hour, I gave up.

I then put the original SD card in, I got the skateboarding guy.

I then wiped the Dalvik cache and restarted with the *original* card back in. After another half hour, I still have the skateboarding guy. :eek:

What should I do next?

Thanks!

Richard
 
TheOnlyRick said:
A few months ago I:

Rooted my HTC Desire
Installed CM7
Formatted my SD card with EXT3
Was happy


Today I put a new blank EXT2 SD card in. I got the skateboarding guy. After a half hour, I gave up.

I then put the original SD card in, I got the skateboarding guy.

I then wiped the Dalvik cache and restarted with the *original* card back in. After another half hour, I still have the skateboarding guy. :eek:

What should I do next?

Thanks!

Richard
Click to expand...

we need to know more about this, you said it was working fine with ext3. did you use s2e for apps2sd with it?
did you do a nand backup before switching cards and restore once now card was inserted?
why are you using ext2 when you were using ext3 before eitherway ext4 is the best?
when you say "ext2 card" have you formatted the whole card as ext2 or just a second partition?
how did you format/partition the card?
 
Rastaman-FB said:
we need to know more about this, you said it was working fine with ext3. did you use s2e for apps2sd with it?
did you do a nand backup before switching cards and restore once now card was inserted?
why are you using ext2 when you were using ext3 before eitherway ext4 is the best?
when you say "ext2 card" have you formatted the whole card as ext2 or just a second partition?
how did you format/partition the card?
Click to expand...

I used S2E.

Is the ext2 or ext3 distinction important? I'm pretty sure that first time around I used ext3. (I did some more research this time and I found a site that said ext2 would be better.) I figured my phone wouldn't need the journalling features, so ext2 would need the least management, and therefore be best.

I didn't do a NAND backup.

I formatted the whole card as ext2 using Ueases. (sp?)

Thanks, Richard
 
I'm afraid you'll need to repartition the new card. For one thing, the A2SD tool will be expecting the second partition to be ext, so with only one partition I don't think it will work. Plus everything else you want to store on SD (photos, music, Titanium or Nandroid backups, etc) will need a fat32 partition. In fact it's wasteful to make the ext partition too big, since it isn't used for anything but app storage (and optionally dalvik cache).

Secondly, you'll need to get your apps off the ext partition of the old card onto the partition on the new one. The simplest way of doing this is to do what Rasta said: take a nandroid, copy that to the ext partition of the new card, then restore the nandroid.

So it's no surprise that the phone wouldn't boot with the new card. The question is why won't it boot with the old one back in? So did you do anything other than change cards, try to boot, change back? And while we know you didn't take a nandroid, how recent are your app and data backups? And just to be sure, have you tried just removing the card, checking the contacts are clean, and replacing, just in case it wasn't inserted properly?
 
Thanks Hadron.

I'll partition the new card - that's not a problem. (The annoying thing is how much I've forgotten since I originally rooted my phone!)

OK - so on the new card, I need two partitions. 31GB of FAT32 and then 1GB of EXT2 sound about right? (EXT2 sounded best because of the lack of journalling, which sounds like too much work for a mobile phone.)

Re apps. Is the backup option in Clockwork the same as a nandroid backup. I hope so!

Restoring them: It seems like XP can't read EXT partitions, and when I boot to a Ubuntu CD, I don't have write perms to any of the drives on my PC. How do I copy from one SD card to another?

If I can't restore all the apps, and instead do a fresh install of them, that's not too bad - it would be a good way to get rid of accumulated crud that I've installed and uninstalled over the months.

Of course I want to get the new card to work, but at the moment just getting the phone to boot would be a victory - so onto the old card:

Today I put the 8GB card into a card reader in my PC. I booted into Ubuntu from CD and tried to take a copy of the whole card. I couldn't because of being unable to write to any of my NTFS hard drives.

I might have damaged my card because when I was in Ubuntu, I did get a lot of USB hardware errors, and I didn't safely eject the card. (I figured that as I wasn't writing to the card, I didn't need to worry about safely ejecting - or at least that's how it is in Windows.)

I put the card back in the phone and that's when it started looping. After about an hour, I went into Clockwork recovery and deleted the cache (I thought it was the dalvik cache). I rebooted. After a half hour of looping, I went back into recovery and deleted the dalvik. I rebooted, it looped.

I've also tried rebooting with no SD card. Would you expect that to work? (It didn't!)

No recent backup, I'm afraid.

Thanks, Richard

Hadron said:
I'm afraid you'll need to repartition the new card. For one thing, the A2SD tool will be expecting the second partition to be ext, so with only one partition I don't think it will work. Plus everything else you want to store on SD (photos, music, Titanium or Nandroid backups, etc) will need a fat32 partition. In fact it's wasteful to make the ext partition too big, since it isn't used for anything but app storage (and optionally dalvik cache).

Secondly, you'll need to get your apps off the ext partition of the old card onto the partition on the new one. The simplest way of doing this is to do what Rasta said: take a nandroid, copy that to the ext partition of the new card, then restore the nandroid.

So it's no surprise that the phone wouldn't boot with the new card. The question is why won't it boot with the old one back in? So did you do anything other than change cards, try to boot, change back? And while we know you didn't take a nandroid, how recent are your app and data backups? And just to be sure, have you tried just removing the card, checking the contacts are clean, and replacing, just in case it wasn't inserted properly?
Click to expand...
 
Sorry, brief as only have a minute.

Partitions sound fine. Ext3 or 4 generally recommended.

You just copy fat32 partition. Use nandroid to populate ext. So need to get phone working to take nandroid (which is what CWM Backup is)
 
My phone doesn't boot with or without the SD card in. I used S2E. Don't think I moved Dalvik (but can't really remember.)

I guess:

If you would expect it to boot without the SD inserted, then I need to worry about getting the phone working and ignore the SD.

If you wouldn't expect it to boot without the SD inserted, then I need to concentrate on getting the card working.

So do I need to concentrate on the phone or SD card?

Thanks, R.
 
I've also put in the new SD card with 2 partitions:
Primary: 31GB FAT32
Logical: 1GB EXT3

Still not getting past the skateboarding android...

TheOnlyRick said:
My phone doesn't boot with or without the SD card in. I used S2E. Don't think I moved Dalvik (but can't really remember.)

I guess:

If you would expect it to boot without the SD inserted, then I need to worry about getting the phone working and ignore the SD.

If you wouldn't expect it to boot without the SD inserted, then I need to concentrate on getting the card working.

So do I need to concentrate on the phone or SD card?

Thanks, R.
Click to expand...
 
OK, took the SD out of mine and tried to boot it.

On Mildwilds Oxy Rom, with 1gb ext4 partition with everything on it (dalvick, apps etc).

Astonished to say it did boot - loaded up the default launcher that came with the rom (was running Go but that was on the SD card). Its got a signal, and connects to wifi.

Is there anything on the phone you need to keep? I'm assuming you can get to recovery (you mentioned wiping cache above) so if you are prepared to wipe the phone you could do a full wipe and try installing a new rom that doesn't need an ext partition.

This would be most of the ASOP roms such as the mildwild ones. It doesn't matter which - you just want to see if the phone boots? If it boots - then the issue is with your SD.
 
One more thing. Just put the SD card back in and rebooted. Its fired up to Go launcher fine, but all the widgets are broken. Will need to reapply them. Everything else seems OK though.
 
Thanks for doing that - sorry you have to re-do your widgets!

I can get to recovery, but it's been ages since I did a backup.

I guess I'll have to wipe my phone and reinstall everything from scratch. But I'm gonna hold on for a bit in case anyone has any ideas...

If/when I do it:

1 - I hope it works.
2 - It would be nice to know why removing the SD, putting it in a PC, (but not writing to it) and putting it back in the phone would cause problems.

Thanks, R.

coos lick said:
OK, took the SD out of mine and tried to boot it.

On Mildwilds Oxy Rom, with 1gb ext4 partition with everything on it (dalvick, apps etc).

Astonished to say it did boot - loaded up the default launcher that came with the rom (was running Go but that was on the SD card). Its got a signal, and connects to wifi.

Is there anything on the phone you need to keep? I'm assuming you can get to recovery (you mentioned wiping cache above) so if you are prepared to wipe the phone you could do a full wipe and try installing a new rom that doesn't need an ext partition.

This would be most of the ASOP roms such as the mildwild ones. It doesn't matter which - you just want to see if the phone boots? If it boots - then the issue is with your SD.
Click to expand...
 
I can't think why removing/replacing the card like that would cause problems. I've done it myself just fine. Though you did mention USB errors and an unclean dismount.

To go back to your earlier question about backing up the card, you are correct that Windows can't read Ext partitions. You could try creating an Ubuntu virtual machine, which would then be able to write to its space on the hard drive. That way you may be able to back up both partitions (I've backed-up my ext partition this way in the past, just to test the theory). If it works, then you could consider completely flattening the card and repartitioning it, then reloading. If it's the card that might work, if not it's a lot of time for nothing.

Thing is, if coos lick's phone booted with the card removed, why won't yours? Is it S2E, or because you moved something he didn't, or....? If we knew that we'd know whether fiddling with the card will have a chance of fixing it.

I'm sure that a wipe of the phone will fix it, but because of the lack of backups that's a last resort.
 
Shame, but I think you're right.

I'm gonna wipe it. It's not ideal, but frankly, I don't think there's much chance of someone coming onto this thread and being able to help me.

I've got a pretty good idea of how to set everything back up again, I'll just need to spend a few hours re-setting it all up again.

Let's hope it all goes to plan!

Thanks once again,

Richard
 
Every time I read the title of this thread I think of "chasing the pink dragon". But substitute rock & roll lifestyle with people who flash their phones and heroin with custom roms.
 
TheOnlyRick said:
I've also put in the new SD card with 2 partitions:
Primary: 31GB FAT32
Logical: 1GB EXT3

Still not getting past the skateboarding android...
Click to expand...

Just noticed the above, your EXT partition also needs to be set as a Primary partition - think that's probably why you can't boot as EXT isn't being recognised.
 
he needs to use gparted tooo.
or flash 4ext and use that to partition. im still not fully convinced but people swear to me it formats/partitions/aligns correctly
 
Hi - Just coming back to update. I reformatted the partition as primary and it worked like a charm (after running S2E).

Easeus worked very well as well. When I used the bootable CD version of GParted a few months ago I found that it kept failing to recognise the SD card - after lots of plugging and unplugging, and a few reboots, I think I was getting less than 20% success rate with the hardware being discovered.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who helped me out.

Cheers, Richard
 
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