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Root Link2SD for HTC M8, what are the disadvantages?

norweger

norweger

Well-Known Member
I have taken a quick look at articles about rooting, and the most beneficial app I've seen so far is for moving apps to the SD-card. But would rooting simply to install Link2SD cause a lot of issues, like sporadic crashes, and not being able to autoupdate the os any more?
 
Link2SD is an incredible legacy bandaid.

Are you saying that you need more than 24 GB for app storage??

I'm sorry I can't answer your other questions, I'm just curious as to what you're trying for. :confused:

I'm not sure why you want OTA updates at all.
 
EarlyMon said:
Link2SD is an incredible legacy bandaid.

Are you saying that you need more than 24 GB for app storage??

I'm sorry I can't answer your other questions, I'm just curious as to what you're trying for. :confused:

I'm not sure why you want OTA updates at all.
Click to expand...

I am using Google Cardboard, which is pretty amazing, and some of the apps are huge. I got a 128 GB SD Card, and the phone has 16 GB of internal storage.

OTA updates are preferable just because they're hassle free.
 
I see - I take it you have the M8d (dual sim) then.

OK - I can share a little bit, not sure if it's going to be helpful or not.

Your phone storage is divided into partitions, probably around ten or twelve - the bootloader, recovery, radio firmware, the boot/kernel area, the system area, data and of course the sd card is its own deal.

Updates can touch any partition except /data and the internal and external sd cards.

Link2SD points away from /data inside the phone and out to a separate partition on your SD card that you'll create.

So far that's all separate from what an OTA would touch but there's a catch.

The stuff that does the /data swap is in the /system area - and OTA updates tend to check that the /system area is as HTC made it or the update won't happen or worse, will seriously break something. Ditto for other partitions.

That's why you have to be unrooted for an OTA to work right - root modifies /system.

At minimum I would guess that you're going to need a way to root and unroot, possibly be able to go back and forth between stock and custom recovery (so you can root), and somehow be able to reverse the Link2SD mods along with unrooting.

Wish I could help with the mechanics but I don't know this stuff well enough.

Pretty sure that's the stuff to be looking out for though.
 
EarlyMon said:
I see - I take it you have the M8d (dual sim) then.

OK - I can share a little bit, not sure if it's going to be helpful or not.

Your phone storage is divided into partitions, probably around ten or twelve - the bootloader, recovery, radio firmware, the boot/kernel area, the system area, data and of course the sd card is its own deal.

Updates can touch any partition except /data and the internal and external sd cards.

Link2SD points away from /data inside the phone and out to a separate partition on your SD card that you'll create.

So far that's all separate from what an OTA would touch but there's a catch.

The stuff that does the /data swap is in the /system area - and OTA updates tend to check that the /system area is as HTC made it or the update won't happen or worse, will seriously break something. Ditto for other partitions.

That's why you have to be unrooted for an OTA to work right - root modifies /system.

At minimum I would guess that you're going to need a way to root and unroot, possibly be able to go back and forth between stock and custom recovery (so you can root), and somehow be able to reverse the Link2SD mods along with unrooting.

Wish I could help with the mechanics but I don't know this stuff well enough.

Pretty sure that's the stuff to be looking out for though.
Click to expand...

That was very useful. A quantum leap forward, as in small but important step. When using Link2SD you have to choose the size of the two partitions on the SD card, how should they be split (50/50?), and how would these partitions be different in their function?
 
norweger said:
That was very useful. A quantum leap forward, as in small but important step. When using Link2SD you have to choose the size of the two partitions on the SD card, how should they be split (50/50?), and how would these partitions be different in their function?
Click to expand...
Yeah, the split is based on personal choice - with a 128 GB card and big VR apps, 50/50 sounds fair.

There's a few different ways to take your question about the functional differences so I'll take a shot at a few different things.

The /data partition has to have a way to be separated from other partitions. There's a whole body of work on this so I'm just going to cover the basics.

SD cards are formatted with a version of Microsoft FAT. It's fine for card storage but not ok for private data usage - no version of FAT supports file ownership or access protection.

Your built-in partitions are formatted with the Linux ext4 file system type to gain those features - your /data partition on the sd card will need to be the same.

So you'll not only have 2 sd card partitions, they'll be formatted and accessed differently as well.

That's really explained in the Link2SD description.

You may also want to check out "FolderMount [ROOT]"

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.devasque.fmount

It's pretty similar.

You may want to Google for more information on both FolderMount and Link2SD - I'm really at the end of what I know here and so far as I recall you're the first M8 user asking about it here.
 
EarlyMon said:
Your phone storage is divided into partitions, probably around ten or twelve - the bootloader, recovery, radio firmware, the boot/kernel area, the system area, data and of course the sd card is its own deal.
Click to expand...

That's very informative. The last time I made a partition is only a distant memory, it was on my old 486 computer, and I separated my hard drive into C:\ and D:\ and I wonder, are the partitions you mentioned there kind of the the same concept?

I have found folders on my HTC M8 so far, but haven't located separate 'drives' except the SD cards. I guess the bootloader would be comparable with the BIOS which was on a chip back in the old days.
 
The partitions I'm mentioning are exactly the same concept as taking a single disk drive and splitting it into C and D logical drives.

On a pc, they were both formatted the same (probably NTFS).

In the case of the sd card, you will format the two partitions differently.

The internal sd card storage will continue to be exFAT - the other partition will be ext4. Iow, a Windows type and a Linux type partition. There are apps on the Play Store that can help with the details.

The bootloader is like a pc bios but it is not a bios.

Like a bios, it's at the lowest level and controls the pointer to where the boot up starts and other similar management functions.

Unlike a bios, it's not generic and won't help you with this.

All of your mods will only become apparent after booting up.
 
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