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Swap Internal & External Memory

Vincible

Vincible

Newbie
I came across this as an alternative way to get the most out of your external SD card to preserve your internal memory. I find it's best to do this after a fresh factory reset, and maybe a reflashing of your rom (I'm using the Xperion Rom) Ultimately it will do just as the title of this thread says: Swap Internal & External Memory

First if you haven't already you should follow this tutorial for link2sd and just follow the steps for the Aparted part first on Android Creations site. We'll come back to it later for the link2sd part.

Link: http://androidcreations.weebly.com/how-to-setup-link2sd.html

Next after you've partitioned your external SD card you can go ahead and factory reset your phone via CWM and reflash your rom if you want a fresh start, if not then that's your decision.

After you've made that decision upon your phone rebooting back up(or not if you never did a fresh start), install Root External 2 Internal and follow the steps below:

Root External 2 Internal: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.codlab.int2ext

Step 1: Install Root External to Internal

Step 2: Go to settings View attachment 74277

Step 3: Check both Send Rescan & Use per default View attachment 74278

Step 4: Change the Original internal mounting point to /storage/sdcard0
View attachment 74279

Step 5: Change the Original external mounting point to /storage/external_SD

Step 6: Click on View the different devices and a list should be available below it. Then scroll down and you should see something that says /dev/block/vold/179:33 make note of it and go back up to The ext. sdcard device access. Click on it and change the 179:49 to 179:33. (if your device says something else for that part be careful it's not for your ext. 4 partition you want the external_SD card part).

View attachment 74280

View attachment 74281

View attachment 74282

View attachment 74285

Step 7: Go back to the main menu of the app and click on the External > Internal button and viola the swap is done. (Make sure the at boot is checked because anytime you reboot it will reswap it back to normal and all you have to do us open up Root External 2 Internal again and press swap).

View attachment 74287

After you've done these steps head into your storage and check to see if it worked.

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Next install link2sd(link2sd plus I would recommend as the best so you can store data): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.buak.Link2SD

Mount your ext. 4 partition of your external SD card and link all your apps that you can.

Once you've done that, you have finished and enjoy all that memory at your disposal!

Hope this was helpful & feel free to post on how this experience went for you! :)
 
Instead of creating a second partition that is ext4 cant i just format the whole card as ext4 and do away with link2sd? Btw apps are installing to the fat32 partition and seem to be working fine without being moved.
 
I would say yes to doing away with link2sd by just having it ext 4, but you can't mount ext4 format well at least from my attempts it wasn't possible/ wasn't a readable format. & I noticed that as well when I first started downloading apps but after installing many more apps my internal memory for some reason was still being used and I would get 'insufficient memory' as a problem so my solution to it was link2sd.
 
Well im trying to download modern combat 3 which by itself takes up more space than this phone has in internal memory so I'll find out very soon.
 
Yeah I did that too but do it with many apps with a lot of memory and you'll notice your internal memory start to deplete. If that's not the case for you then cheers mate 😁
 
Now I understand what is going on. When you download a large game like modern combat 3, nova 3, or any other game that requires additional files while using this storage swap, the additional files required by the game go to your sd card but the actual app itself still goes to the phone's real internal storage. That would be why a ext4 partition and link2sd plus are still needed.
 
Also, you are right about making the whole card ext4. I backed up all my data then formatted the whole card as ext4 and I got a notification saying BLANK SD CARD OR UNSUPPORTED FILE SYSTEM. Now my card is formatted with about 28gb of fat32 and about 3 or 4gb of ext4.
 
Masterchief said:
Now I understand what is going on. When you download a large game like modern combat 3, nova 3, or any other game that requires additional files while using this storage swap, the additional files required by the game go to your sd card but the actual app itself still goes to the phone's real internal storage. That would be why a ext4 partition and link2sd plus are still needed.
Click to expand...

exactly :)
 
Masterchief said:
Have you had any issues with the apply at boot setting not working? Every time I reboot my phone I have to manually do the swap.
Click to expand...

Yeah it's supposed to do that. At least from what I understand from the app developers notes it is. But the manual swap is really easy to do.
 
I did this, plus the 11extsd2internalsd trick, so it swaps automatically on boot using the SU manager thingy instead of manually going into the play store app every boot to re-swap. My only issue is the duplicates in my gallery. The reason why I am using the external 2 internal app in the play store is because when I try to record videos at longer periods of time, it will give me a low storage error, because when you initially do the 11extsd2internalsd trick the external sd storage becomes lower to that of the phone internal storage (1.27gb) which is a result from the swap, and the phone thinks both internal and external are the SD card some how, or it still goes through the phones initial internal storage, so I cannot record video at high times, even though that trick gave my "internal" extra gigs from my external SD, or at least that's what it was suppose to do. The play store app makes the internal and external both the same external storage amount (7.21gb and 7.21gb, suppose to be around 8gb, but I used some), instead of the external SD only being 1.27gb with using only 11extsd2internalsd trick, so I could record hd video without the phone thinking it has to stop from low storage. Downside = duplicates. I am using link2sd pro, because obviously regardless of all this swapping, phone still goes through its initial internal memory to install large apps or video storage. Link2sd pro moves the app data over to the SD so it will not take up internal memory after they move, but that's another story.
 
koolsk8ter111 said:
I did this, plus the 11extsd2internalsd trick, so it swaps automatically on boot using the SU manager thingy instead of manually going into the play store app every boot to re-swap. My only issue is the duplicates in my gallery. The reason why I am using the external 2 internal app in the play store is because when I try to record videos at longer periods of time, it will give me a low storage error, because when you initially do the 11extsd2internalsd trick the external sd storage becomes lower to that of the phone internal storage (1.27gb) which is a result from the swap, and the phone thinks both internal and external are the SD card some how, or it still goes through the phones initial internal storage, so I cannot record video at high times, even though that trick gave my "internal" extra gigs from my external SD, or at least that's what it was suppose to do. The play store app makes the internal and external both the same external storage amount (7.21gb and 7.21gb, suppose to be around 8gb, but I used some), instead of the external SD only being 1.27gb with using only 11extsd2internalsd trick, so I could record hd video without the phone thinking it has to stop from low storage. Downside = duplicates. I am using link2sd pro, because obviously regardless of all this swapping, phone still goes through its initial internal memory to install large apps or video storage. Link2sd pro moves the app data over to the SD so it will not take up internal memory after they move, but that's another story.
Click to expand...

I see your issue and I had the same problem as well with the internal and external SD being the same after the swap (15gb internal & 15gb external) but of you change the Original internal mounting point from /mnt/SD card to /storage/sdcard0 and also change the Original external mounting point from /mnt/extSDcard to /storage/external_SD you shouldn't have that problem where both your external and internal under settings=>storage are the same amount of memory. Unless if you go into your file manager and go into /storage and your internal SD is named something other than sdcard0 and your external SD card is named something other than external_SD. In that case if they do have different names then just go back to Root External 2 Internal and change the Original internal mounting point from /storage/sdcard0 to /storage/(whatever your internal SD card is called in your file manager) and change your Original external mounting point from /storage/external_SD to /storage/(whatever your external SD card is called in your file manager). With those changes you shouldn't have that problem anymore. As far as the duplicates this might fix the problem, if not then I'm not sure how to go about that; for I have not yet attempted at an automatic swap at boot. Let me know though if the above fixes any of your issues please. Thanks :)
 
Proposal/theory to swap external SD thread towards bottom last page contains info and the files on how to do it. Worked for me on Hroark13's KitKat beta 4 rom, (got 26gb "internal", 5 gb "ext") and a few others with 4.1.2 JB got it working. (it supposedly can work down to Android 4.0, but was intended for 4.1.2)
 
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