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Root Miui, partitions, force close etc :)

O

oisteing

Newbie
Trying my luck again, this seems to be THE place to go to when noobs are stuck and need help from people who know stuff :)

OK, perhaps the last six months with miui have moved me out of the extreme noob-category, but we'll see.

I have a Desire with the latest Miui XJ. I get a lot of FC's and lockups, and have no idea why. Even right after flashing a new ROM, things like market, gapps, settings etc goes on to FC. I have a class 6 SD card (16GB), and used recovery to make an EXT partition of 2 gigabyte. (Have tried 1 gb and 512 mb earlier). I tried to wipe dalvik before flashing. Tried to wipe battery before flashing. I had problemes both on my slow class 2 SD and on my class 6 SD.

What can I try next? Anyone's guess is appreciated!
 
Not sure if recoveries make partitions particularly well.
If flashed the ROM then took out your sd card does it freeze? (without installing anything)
 
I tried again yesterday, using gparted to make new partitions, as I heard the CWM recovery is dodgy about it.

I don't really follow - the Miui XJ runs mostly from SD card, I thought that was the point about using that for data2ext, over the regular miui, that has apps2SD. I tried now, booting without the SD card, and as you anticipated, it does boot, but of course, without most apps present. I guess I can try to use it like this for a day or two, and see if it freezes again. Thanks for the tip (not that I know what to do, if this proves my new SD card to be the source of conflicts!)
 
BTW, after booting without the SD card, then booting again WITH the SD card, all widgets were gone, but apps and data were back. Is there anything the should indicates widgets are more flaky on XJ than on other ROMs??
 
If using just a2sd you should not need a very large et partition - 512 is almost certainly fine, 1GB max. GParted should handle everything, but to be sure can you tell us what partitions you have: should be just 2 primary partitions, first one fat32 and the second ext.

If you've reparitioned the card you've very likely wiped the ext partition - except I'd not expect the phone to boot at all in that case! Do you have a nandroid from before the repartitioning (i.e. before running GParted)? If so, try restoring that (obviously back up any newer data you wish to keep).

It's important to understand the difference between the root-style apps2sd, where apps are moved to the ext partition, and "move to sd" via the phone menu, where they are moved to the fat32 partition. If you are using an a2sd ROM, apps on SD-Ext will look like they are "on the phone", and it's important to know this to understand whether the a2sd is working. I usually recommend installing "Quick System Info" and using it to check whether the a2sd is working, though Ti Backup can also show you this (bottom of the initial screen).

Edit: should add that I have no experience of data2ext. I can guess what it does, and what the pitfalls may be, but it's only guesswork. Unless you have a fast card standard a2sd is recommended, and even if you have a fast card I'm not convinced it's the best solution - I can do just fine without sd-ext at all, and certainly could do enough with a2sd+ that nothing more was needed.
 
Appreciate the effort, Hadron!

I have to partitions, 1GB ext, 14 GB FAT32. That's what shows up in gparted... 2012-02-12_134746.jpg

I don't understand which of these parts should add up to 16 GB, though... :confused:

I agree that a2sd is ok, but on the desire, I use quite a lot of apps, and the reason I went to data2ext is just to be able to put some largish games on there in addition :)

Just to have a working phone I went to Cyanogen Clockworkmod 7, which I guess is an a2sd ROM, however this one also has some options about where to store apps, choices being internal, external or automatic. A lot of stuff to be confused about!
 
1GB + 14GB = 16GB will be a combination of 2 things: rounding and marketing. The "marketing" bit is that card and drive manufacturers almost always lie about the capacity of their devices. When describing the capacity, they will define "Giga" as 10^9. This is the normal use of that prefix in most contexts, but in IT it is normal to use binary prefixes: k = 2^10 (i.e. 1024), M = k*k, G = k*k*k. Thus in computing parlance a GB should be 2^30 bytes, which is about 7% larger than 10^9 bytes.

I call this lying because the only part of the computing system that will use this definition is the card (or hard drive) manufacturer's literature, and therefore this does in practice mislead the user about the real capacity of the device, and they do this knowing that to be the case.

What this means in reality is that what the card manufacturer calls a 16GB card really only has 14.9GB of space, and that does add up to your 2 partitions.

OK, rant over :). You are using CyanogenMod 7 (ClockWorkMod, CWM, is something different), which actually isn't an a2sd ROM, at least not out of the box. Those options are simply "install everything internal", "install everything you can on fat32", or "use the default for that app", and it won't be using the ext at all. To use a2sd with CM7 you need to either flash an a2sd script, such as DarkTremor, or install an app called Simple2Ext from the market. That second one is probably the simplest solution, though it only works with CM, not with other ROMs.
 
Hahah Hadron, always going right into the detail.

In summary though,

Hardware manufacturers (incorrectly) use 1000 Bytes as a Kilobyte, 1000 Kilobytes as a Megabyte and 1000 Megabytes as a Gigabyte

Software (correctly) uses 1024 Bytes as a Kilobyte, 1024 Kilobytes as a Megabyte etc etc

Basically, take a "16GB" sd Card. x1000("MB")x1000("KB")x1000("B") and you get how many "Bytes" in HW it is (16000000000).

Then take 16,000,000,000"B" and /1024(B)/1024(KB)/1024(MB) and you get how much actual (and correctly recorded) data you can get on there. Being 14.901161194 TRUE GB on a "16GB" card.

Of course this works the other way too.

Just remember that BxKBxMB=GB so to get back to the multiplier (Bytes) you must x the gigabyte by 1000 per unit if its hardware or 1024 per unit if its software. If your starting figure is MB, then you only have BxKB

I was supposed to be simplifying what Hadron said. FAIL!
 
I'm with you though. Its a Huge LIE and it angers me. When I buy an 80GB Hard drive, I want to fit more than 74GB of data on it.
 
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