Help Question before i partition my sd card?

[CrimsonToker]

I've been looking online at how to do this, and i keep seeing mini tool wizard mentioned. But everyone keeps saying it works up to Windows7, with no mention of 8. Does it work with 8.1? I don't want to ruin my new 64 gig card..

 

[Hadron]

Minitool is mentioned because it's easily available, not because it's good. If you want one of the partitions to be ext format I'd personally recommend gparted.

A few years ago when a lot of people were doing this I saw a lot of people with ext3 or ext4 partitions which didn't work for moving apps, and we fixed them by repartitioning using gparted rather than Minitool.

 

[CrimsonToker]

Minitool is mentioned because it's easily available, not because it's good. If you want one of the partitions to be ext format I'd personally recommend gparted.

A few years ago when a lot of people were doing this I saw a lot of people with ext3 or ext4 partitions which didn't work for moving apps, and we fixed them by repartitioning using gparted rather than Minitool.

I'm very confused by what these terms mean. I've also been told fat32 is a good partition type. I have a 64 gig card. I want to partition off half of it for music, the other half for link2sd

 

[CrimsonToker]

I will look into gparted, thank you

 

[Hadron]

I'm very confused by what these terms mean. I've also been told fat32 is a good partition type. I have a 64 gig card. I want to partition off half of it for music, the other half for link2sd

I've never used Link2SD with a fat32 partition, but back when I did try it using ext partitions and an init script was commonplace so I had an ext partition anyway. According to Link2SD's Play Store description it can move apps to a fat32 partition but not app data, so it may depend on whether that's something you want to do.

 

[CrimsonToker]

I would like to move apps and data to the card. Can i do that? I only have 4 gigs internal, after system and utility apps there isn't much room for games

 

[Hadron]

According to the description obb files (often a big part of modern games, I'm told) can be moved with fat32, and also apks, but if you want to move the actual app data (stuff that's normally in /data/data) then you need to use a non-fat partition format.

It obviously can't move system apps, but I would guess that if you set it up to move data it will be able to move system apps' data too. Of course there may be a performance hit from moving the app data (the SD card is both slower and less reliable than the internal storage) - that was a step I never tried back when I had to deal with these problems (and if you think having 2GB left is bad, consider that a HTC Desire A8181 with a stock ROM and nothing installed had 147 MB of internal storage! Tricks with sd card partitions and even repartitioning the internal storage were more-or-less required. But that was the joy of early 2010 Android ).

 

[CrimsonToker]

Honestly I'm now thinking of just upgrading to a better phone. Kind of have my eye set on the 32 gig M9. In which case I won't care as much about partitioning the card. There's no other reason I can think of to do it..

 

[Hadron]

No, with an M9 I cannot think of any reason at all to partition the card - you won't need to for apps, and partitioning it will just reduce space available for media.

I have to admit the M9 looks nice. The only thing that's stopping me at the moment is that I don't actually need to upgrade, but let's see how I feel when the 2 year anniversary of my current M7 approaches

 

[CrimsonToker]

Lol I use my smart phone as if it were a laptop, and actually, I'm so used to android now that I don't like windows or want to go back, so I need to upgrade to something good..