[Q] Getting Internal & External Storage to work together

[Q] Getting Internal & External Storage to work together - Motorola Photon 4G

Coming from the Evo, I'm not used to having both Internal storage (8gb on the phone) and External storage (my microsd card) available to me. As I'm restoring files and data, I'm finding that numerous apps are hardcoded to only look to one filepath: /mnt/sdcard. That was fine on the Evo, as that pointed to the actual SD Card, but on the P4G, it points to the Internal storage.
Being rooted, I tried just making a simple symlink in /mnt/sdcard to /mnt/sdcard-ext but that didn't fly. And I don't want to necessarily "swap" the two by hacking whatever is the equivalent of fstab.
Thoughts on how to better manage having two data stores? Am I just going to have to get used to a new way of doing things?

I have the same issue with Companion Link for Outlook.

Related

[Q] Messing with /etc/vold.fstab & Software RAID-0

Since day 1 of owning the Atrix, it bothered me that that there were two mount points:
/mnt/sdcard (16GB internal memory)
/mnt/sdcard-ext (32GB micro SD card that I shoved in there)
Why it bothers me:
1) It is the year 2011 -- technology's progressed too far to be doing stupid s$&# like this
2) Most devs have no idea that /mnt/sdcard-ext even exists.
3) When I plug my phone in to my BMW w/ iDrive the internal memory gets presented to the iDrive system, NOT the SD card. Problem is that all of my music is on the SD card, NOT the internal memory.
4) Why can't I have 48GB of contiguous space instead of two separate 16GB and 32GB mount points??!?!
...so, I got fed up and edited /etc/vold.fstab, commented out /mnt/sdcard and renamed /mnt/sdcard-ext to /mnt/sdcard. Oh, and rebooted...
All is fine and dandy now, there's one 32GB /mnt/sdcard and NO 16GB /mnt/anything. The device is still there, just not mounted. So that means that I lost 16GB of usable space. Yes, but that leads me to my work-in-progress project. Somehow I need to port mdadm to the Atrix and setup a RAID-0 with the following devices:
The internal eMMC:
/devices/platform/tegra-sdhci.3/mmc_host/mmc0/mmc0:0001/block/mmcblk0/mmcblk0p18
The SD card:
/devices/platform/tegra-sdhci.2/mmc_host/mmc2 /devices/platform/tegra-sdhci.2/mmc_host/mmc1
Once the Software RAID-0 is established, it should be as simple as mounting it back to /mnt/sdcard. It's not rocket science, just Linux .
So my question: In the interest of time, has anyone even attempted to do that yet? By the way, Rule #1 if it works: DON'T REMOVE THE SD CARD!

I never thought of that being an issue there but yeah i see your point now. Some car stereo systems do see the external sdcard though; my el-cheapo generic joint from best buy could even use usb hubs, thereby letting me plug in my treo and my usb stick. It would index music from both.
RAID on Android might not be a good thing here though; what happens when the internal sd card and the external card can't be read or written to at the same speed?
Or if somehow the sd card inadvertently comes loose inside the phone? (This happens to me from time to time on my current phone)
Then again, I'm only familiar with the PC / Data center implementation of RAID
Sent from my SBM005SH using XDA App

Does changing default storage in the settings have any effect? I'd laugh if it did
Sent from my Xoom using XDA App

starrwulfe,
yeah, I guess a firmware update to the iDrive *could* in theory fix that issue but I guess they're expecting people to plug in a single USB flash drive to it. Good thing the el-cheapo one is smarter than that
as far as the RAID-0 being different speeds, it shouldn't matter because it's a RAID--0 (spanning). So you might get different speeds depending on which memory device it's being read from/written to but it shouldn't cause any problems. As far as it coming loose inside the phone, what are you doing with your phone that makes that happen? lol Mine's never come out
ChongoDroid,
that would be TOO easy lol...but naw, that's just for windows media sync so you have a choice of which storage location is presented to windows media player..

varandian said:
Since day 1 of owning the Atrix, it bothered me that that there were two mount points:
/mnt/sdcard (16GB internal memory)
/mnt/sdcard-ext (32GB micro SD card that I shoved in there)
Why it bothers me:
1) It is the year 2011 -- technology's progressed too far to be doing stupid s$&# like this
2) Most devs have no idea that /mnt/sdcard-ext even exists.
3) When I plug my phone in to my BMW w/ iDrive the internal memory gets presented to the iDrive system, NOT the SD card. Problem is that all of my music is on the SD card, NOT the internal memory.
4) Why can't I have 48GB of contiguous space instead of two separate 16GB and 32GB mount points??!?!
...so, I got fed up and edited /etc/vold.fstab, commented out /mnt/sdcard and renamed /mnt/sdcard-ext to /mnt/sdcard. Oh, and rebooted...
All is fine and dandy now, there's one 32GB /mnt/sdcard and NO 16GB /mnt/anything. The device is still there, just not mounted. So that means that I lost 16GB of usable space. Yes, but that leads me to my work-in-progress project. Somehow I need to port mdadm to the Atrix and setup a RAID-0 with the following devices:
The internal eMMC:
/devices/platform/tegra-sdhci.3/mmc_host/mmc0/mmc0:0001/block/mmcblk0/mmcblk0p18
The SD card:
/devices/platform/tegra-sdhci.2/mmc_host/mmc2 /devices/platform/tegra-sdhci.2/mmc_host/mmc1
Once the Software RAID-0 is established, it should be as simple as mounting it back to /mnt/sdcard. It's not rocket science, just Linux .
So my question: In the interest of time, has anyone even attempted to do that yet? By the way, Rule #1 if it works: DON'T REMOVE THE SD CARD!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Give me the exact year and model of your Bimmer as well as the exact issue (I assume it's that the i-Drive won't see the external SD in your Atrix), and I will look into it at work. I assume you are connecting it through the USB Aux input. It may be a software issue or it may just be that the i-Drive doesn't do it. I will see if I can find out for sure.
I have the exact same setup on my Atrix (all music on external SD) so I can play with it at work.
I'm not back to work until Friday, but i'll see what I can dig up then.

GibMcFragger,
2008 535i w/ the navigation option. Thanks for offering to look into it but I don't want both of them to show up in the iDrive, I want to have one device show up as 48GB instead of one as 16GB and the other as 32GB.

varandian said:
GibMcFragger,
2008 535i w/ the navigation option. Thanks for offering to look into it but I don't want both of them to show up in the iDrive, I want to have one device show up as 48GB instead of one as 16GB and the other as 32GB.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Oh. Do they both show up at the moment in the i-Drive as separate drives, or the external doesn't shop up at all? If they both show up, but as separate drives.........that is normal I think because of the way the phone mounts them as you said earlier.
So basically:
External drive doesn't show AT ALL in the i-Drive = Possible issue
External drive shows but as separate drive than internal in i-Drive = Normal
As for changing them to show as one in RAID, I would think that would cause more issues that it's worth as both the internal and external drives have to be the same speed of card (highly unlikely as we don't know what flash memory Moto used in the phone), as well as the fact that SD cards tend to corrupt data easily.

3) When I plug my phone in to my BMW w/ iDrive the internal memory gets presented to the iDrive system, NOT the SD card. Problem is that all of my music is on the SD card, NOT the internal memory.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Not sure what the goal is here, but you could just put a mount of the external sdcard in the internal memory folder, say ln -s /mnt/sdcard-ext /sdcard/Music. Or you could edit vold.conf maybe to change /mnt/sdcard-ext to /mnt/sdcard/Music.
Cheers!

Saw this thread while waiting for the vet and forgot about it. Just came to say, what you're trying to achieve isn't RAID 0, or even RAID at all. It's a spanned volume, which is variously referred to as JBOD or SPAN.
The real question is, does Android support such a thing. Without checking, no way to know. My gut says no, though.

GibMcFragger said:
As for changing them to show as one in RAID, I would think that would cause more issues that it's worth as both the internal and external drives have to be the same speed of card (highly unlikely as we don't know what flash memory Moto used in the phone), as well as the fact that SD cards tend to corrupt data easily.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
As was stated previously, the speed of the cards doesn't matter. However, it does mean that the phone now requires that specific (external) SD card be inserted at all times, or the filesystem will be considered corrupt, and data will be lost.
To the OP: the issue with the external SD card not being available in the BMW is a problem with how the BMW handles multi-LUN USB storage devices: multiple storage devices available via one single USB connection. GibMcFragger's suggestion is spot on, with checking for available firmware updates.
Though I don't think it's a good idea, you could always look at a UnionFS mount of the external SD card on top of the internal SD card. This allows for the SD card to be backed up and replaced without any trickery.

NFHimself said:
Not sure what the goal is here, but you could just put a mount of the external sdcard in the internal memory folder, say ln -s /mnt/sdcard-ext /sdcard/Music.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I tried doing an ln -s /mnt/sdcard-ext /mnt/sdcard/ExternalSD and got the error:
Code:
link failed Operation not permitted
Then I did su (yes, I'm rooted), and then the same command and got the same error. I then tried doing the ln command without the -s (both as su and regular) and got this error:
Code:
link failed Cross-device link
Any ideas?

Also, editing /system/etc/vold.fstab so that internal sd card mounts first and then mount external sdcard on /mnt/sdcard/ExternalSD doesn't work. Loads internal sd just fine though....

quordandis said:
I tried doing an ln -s /mnt/sdcard-ext /mnt/sdcard/ExternalSD and got the error:
Code:
link failed Operation not permitted
Then I did su (yes, I'm rooted), and then the same command and got the same error. I then tried doing the ln command without the -s (both as su and regular) and got this error:
Code:
link failed Cross-device link
Any ideas?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
ln does a hardlink which is just two metadata references to the same data blocks. It will look like two different files, but the data is stored in just one place on disk. If you delete one, the data stays (for the other ref) and no space is freed. This is not supported across filesystems, only within a single filesystem.
ln -s creates a symbolic link where the link is just a special file that references the real file, not just the data blocks of that file. This works across filesystems, but is filesystem dependent. I'm pretty sure the vfat filesystem that is doubtlessly on your sdcard doesn't support this.
messing with RAID is risky. A previous poster mentioned something like unionFS, but unfortunately what we're talking about here is individual partition exporting via USB, and so filesystem trickery won't cut it. What you probably want to do is just prevent the internal sdcard from being exported and limit that to only the external sdcard. I believe this can be accomplished from within the android GUI, no?

[Q] sd card and /sdcard location?

I'd noticed that newer GB HTC devices seem to have moved /sdcard from the
real sd card slot to the internal memory left over after system related partitions
were allocated.
I wondered if the Rezound suffers from this change too? On my Wi Fi Flyer
I have to keep syncing the data files for Kindle and Nook apps as they think
/sdcard is the actual sd card.
I think the move was done to accommodate HC/ICS's notion of /sdcard
being a virtual partition (not a fat32 real partition, to avoid having to license
Fat32 from M$). As I understood it, HC and ICS use a FUSE re-director mount
to allow the internal /sdcard space to be a directory in a ext? file system that houses
/data, (working around the Incredible's issue of no app data space and
6gb of empty /media space). Since they don't use fat32 they can't use
USB Mass Storage, so another approach was used.
Anyway since both the Kindle and Nook app don't allow a real path
for where to look for their data, on the Flyer I have to sync the sub-directory's
from /sdcard2 to /sdcard so the apps can find them.
Does Rezound do this too?

The Rezounds physical SD cards mounts as /SD Card2

So same issue then? How do others handle Kindle and Nook apps on /sdcard2
when the apps look at /sdcard?

Internal SD vs External SD

It's a noobish question, but I'm still a bit confused as to the internal vs external sd card usage. I know that in some ROMs (currently using SHOstock) the internal 12GB sd is under /mnt/sdcard and the external is under /mnt/sdcard/external_sd, but I never can get anything to use the external card. Why do we have the ability to stick one in our phones if none of our apps can be moved there? The only thing I've been able to use it for is Vignette or things like that where the app configuration allows you to browse to what folder you'd like to use for storage.
What I'm getting at, is that I'd like to move the apps themselves to the external SD, because I have the ability to put a 32GB card in, as opposed to the 12GB internal. Is this possible?
Another related question - TiBu sees my external card's free space, but whenever I use the App2SD function to move it to the "external" card, it moves it to the internal card. Anyone know how to fix this? I'm guessing that it has to do with no ext4 partition on the external SD, but I could be wrong. If that's the case, we're out of luck unless we're running Linux boxes, correct? If that's the case, then I return to my original question - what is the point of having an external SD card if the only thing you can put on it is pictures and/or manually move stuff over using a file explorer app?

The point is to store large media files like movies.
TiBu will also save to external SD.
Note that some apps use the newer Android standard for internal/sdcard mountpoints (/emmc for internal, /sdcard for external), which Samsung does NOT follow. (CyanogenMod, however, does follow this standard.)

Entropy512 said:
TiBu will also save to external SD.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thats a negative. TiBu save files are stored in internal.
Main bonus for having external sdcard for me, is the abilitiy to store pictures and videos. Anything that is no on external sdcard will be lost if the phone gets broken.

They save to internal as default but you can change it to the external SD in the settings options.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk

MotoMudder77 said:
Thats a negative. TiBu save files are stored in internal.
Main bonus for having external sdcard for me, is the abilitiy to store pictures and videos. Anything that is no on external sdcard will be lost if the phone gets broken.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you noticed he said "will" which means it has the capability. It's in TiBu settings.. You can move them to your external sdcard with TiBu as well...
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I777 using xda premium

MotoMudder77 said:
Thats a negative. TiBu save files are stored in internal.
Main bonus for having external sdcard for me, is the abilitiy to store pictures and videos. Anything that is no on external sdcard will be lost if the phone gets broken.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's not true - you can have TiBu save backups to external storage in the settings menu - you just browse to where you want it to save it.
In either case, so really, just to move movies and other large media over to it? Nothing (aside from the few cases) automatically? Like I can't move apps over to it? It has to be the internal? To me that mostly defeats the purpose of having external storage.

DJLittleMike said:
That's not true - you can have TiBu save backups to external storage in the settings menu - you just browse to where you want it to save it.
In either case, so really, just to move movies and other large media over to it? Nothing (aside from the few cases) automatically? Like I can't move apps over to it? It has to be the internal? To me that mostly defeats the purpose of having external storage.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Where do you store your. Nandroid backups? I use the external card for that as well, along with TiBu backups, photos and videos. I sure as hell would not want all of that stuff on the internal storage?
Sent from my GT-I9100 using xda premium

... I'll try to answer the OP question. However, I haven't been around android long enough for this to be an authoritive answer. It's more along the lines of a guess...
The reason for the whacky naming is historical. Back in the early days of android, devices only had a small amount of user storage. It was generally mounted as "/data" and was probably 1-2 GB in size. This area was limited to storing application specific data (and downloaded applications.) Same examples might be your contacts list, your high score in angry birds, etc.
Many of those phones had a SDCard slot, however. Actually, many of the phones not only had the slot, but came with a card as well. The idea was that you could put music files, photo's, etc on this extra sdcard. A user could easily upgrade the card to whatever size was supported by android. In development terms, this became known as the external sdcard (or external memory) because it was user accessible and not required for the device to function. Traditionally, it was mounted as "/sdcard"
As time went on, more and more phones came with this extra storage. At some point, it was no longer user accessible or removable. However, it was still used the same way and for the same purpose (afterall, why would you need more than 1-2 GB for just app storage?) It's still mounted as /sdcard. When you move applications from "internal storage" to "external storage" you are really moving the bulk of the app data from /data to /sdcard.
Of course, competition goes on, and everyone wants to have the biggest and greatest phone. So, why not do something done before and go BACK to adding a user accessible memory card slot in ADDITION to the existing /sdcard "external memory"? The only problem is that android doesn't really have a proper way to address that, so different phones mount it in different ways. For some, it might be "/sdcard2". For others, it might be mounted as a sub directory of /sdcard (sdcard/ext_storage, etc)
Of course, this causes all kind of problems for programs designed to work on both older phones (where /sdcard was actually external) and newer phones (where /sdcard is built in.)
There are efforts with newer versions of android to try and correct this, but legacy stuff holds us back. In honeycomb (and ICS), "/data" and "/sdcard" are actually the same partition. In fact, "/sdcard" actually points to "/data/media." They use the same space, however. There's no longer a concept of "external memory." (However, its still confusing because programs are usually written to work for many different versions of android.)
Want to make things more confusing? Add in CWM Recovery. In that recovery, "sdcard" refers to the /sdcard partition that is often called "external" memory in android development. Then it refers to "internal sdcard" when talking about any additional memory card that is user accessible. (so "sdcard" is built in memory, and "internal sdcard" is the sdcard that's physically external.)
Confused yet? Me too.
Gary

garyd9 said:
... I'll try to answer the OP question. However, I haven't been around android long enough for this to be an authoritive answer. It's more along the lines of a guess...
The reason for the whacky naming is historical. Back in the early days of android, devices only had a small amount of user storage. It was generally mounted as "/data" and was probably 1-2 GB in size. This area was limited to storing application specific data (and downloaded applications.) Same examples might be your contacts list, your high score in angry birds, etc.
Many of those phones had a SDCard slot, however. Actually, many of the phones not only had the slot, but came with a card as well. The idea was that you could put music files, photo's, etc on this extra sdcard. A user could easily upgrade the card to whatever size was supported by android. In development terms, this became known as the external sdcard (or external memory) because it was user accessible and not required for the device to function. Traditionally, it was mounted as "/sdcard"
As time went on, more and more phones came with this extra storage. At some point, it was no longer user accessible or removable. However, it was still used the same way and for the same purpose (afterall, why would you need more than 1-2 GB for just app storage?) It's still mounted as /sdcard. When you move applications from "internal storage" to "external storage" you are really moving the bulk of the app data from /data to /sdcard.
Of course, competition goes on, and everyone wants to have the biggest and greatest phone. So, why not do something done before and go BACK to adding a user accessible memory card slot in ADDITION to the existing /sdcard "external memory"? The only problem is that android doesn't really have a proper way to address that, so different phones mount it in different ways. For some, it might be "/sdcard2". For others, it might be mounted as a sub directory of /sdcard (sdcard/ext_storage, etc)
Of course, this causes all kind of problems for programs designed to work on both older phones (where /sdcard was actually external) and newer phones (where /sdcard is built in.)
There are efforts with newer versions of android to try and correct this, but legacy stuff holds us back. In honeycomb (and ICS), "/data" and "/sdcard" are actually the same partition. In fact, "/sdcard" actually points to "/data/media." They use the same space, however. There's no longer a concept of "external memory." (However, its still confusing because programs are usually written to work for many different versions of android.)
Want to make things more confusing? Add in CWM Recovery. In that recovery, "sdcard" refers to the /sdcard partition that is often called "external" memory in android development. Then it refers to "internal sdcard" when talking about any additional memory card that is user accessible. (so "sdcard" is built in memory, and "internal sdcard" is the sdcard that's physically external.)
Confused yet? Me too.
Gary
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
To expand on Gary's comments here a little bit - I came to the SGS2 from an HTC Aria, which was released roughly 18 months ago (I didn't bother to look up the exact date). This was the first 'decent' Android device available on AT&T.
*ducks the flamethrower blasts from backflip owners*
The Aria had no internal SD storage (or more appropriately named EMMC I guess) and stock had 185MB - yes MB - user available app storage on /data. Needless to say, that is pretty severely limiting as far as app storage goes. To make this even more fun, the phone shipped with Android 2.1 (Eclair) which had NO built in provisions for apps to SD.
Thankfully, the dev community got us a FroYo port fairly quickly - so at least we had Android built-in apps to SD at that point. However, if you take a look at any apps you have Apps2SD'ed on your device, you'll see that in many cases, only about half of the storage cost of these apps actually gets moved to your SD card (internal in the case of the SGS2, external on the Aria).
Later, via CM6 and still later in CM7 we got the ability to move apps to an ext partition on SD cards (this may have eventually been possible at some point on HTC based roms as well, I can't recall). The downside to this was the requirement to "trick" the OS into seeing that ext partition on the external SD card as part of the device's internal storage, and it also meant that putting apps there was an all-or-nothing option. Therefore, if you wanted to switch external SD cards, you had to have a linux box to make a copy of the ext partition on one card, and put it on the other card, or all your apps were gone. This was a royal pain in the arse. On the Aria, I typically ran a 1 GB ext partition on an 8Gb card, and stored both my apps and dalvik cache there.
I currently have a bunch of apps on my SGS2 that I never use, but since I'm only using about 500MB of the available 2GB of internal app storage, I dont' bother to delete them. I don't run a ton of games, but the only time I'd think you'd even want to consider the hassle of moving apps to an ext partion on an external card with the SGS2 would be if you are running out of the internal app storage on /data. It's not getting used for anything at all if you move apps to the external card. If you're committed to doing this though, I'd guess if you grabbed a CM7 build for the SGS2 and an app called S2E in the market, you could probably do it.
sorry for the novel.....
DD

We need to mount another 16GB card and figure a way to RAID em for faster access..
Edit: yeah been drinking again...
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I777 using xda premium

garyd9 said:
Want to make things more confusing? Add in CWM Recovery. In that recovery, "sdcard" refers to the /sdcard partition that is often called "external" memory in android development. Then it refers to "internal sdcard" when talking about any additional memory card that is user accessible. (so "sdcard" is built in memory, and "internal sdcard" is the sdcard that's physically external.)
Confused yet? Me too.
Gary
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This was mainly due to the fact that the Android standards got firmed up during the development of CWM 5.x (which is where support for the "internal" sdcard was first implemented)
Initially, CWM only supported one sdcard - and nearly all integrators chose this to be the internal memory.
Then later in 5.x, CWM added support for external/internal sdcards, following the new Android standard of internal on /emmc and external (but not labeled as such) on /sdcard
The problem is - almost all CWM implementations at this point used /sdcard for the internal mount point.
So the choice when I upgraded to CWM 5.0.2.7 was:
Leave things swapped as is and have the "internal" mislabeled (I had not yet figured out how to build CWM from source at this point)
Swap things and have tons of people be like, "WHERE MAI BACKUPZ?"
I'm thinking of doing the swap next time I update CWM - which might be later this weekend.

Entropy512 said:
I'm thinking of doing the swap next time I update CWM - which might be later this weekend.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'd suggest not directly swapping. The confusion for people switching between different devices with CWM Recovery would be annoying. (I could even see it confusing an experienced user when they jump between different devices that both have CWM Recovery, but use opposite labels.)
Instead of redefining existing terms, it might make things easier to understand if you replace the string "internal sdcard" with a different, but non-conflicting term, such as: "microSD card" or "replaceable sdcard." When a user sees two options, such as "backup to sdcard" and "backup to replaceable sdcard", it's more obvious which one is which. (Of course, "backup to built-in memory" would be even more clear for the former option.)
Take care
Gary

Great info, thanks to all. Now let me throw in another term, "USB Storage." I ran across this in file manager after I had done a complete factory wipe, cache wipe, format, et al. In "USB Storage" was several files I had thought were on the 16Mb Class 6 microSDHC I had just formatted. So, where does this fit in the grand scheme?

BadElf said:
Great info, thanks to all. Now let me throw in another term, "USB Storage." I ran across this in file manager after I had done a complete factory wipe, cache wipe, format, et al. In "USB Storage" was several files I had thought were on the 16Mb Class 6 microSDHC I had just formatted. So, where does this fit in the grand scheme?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Oo! Oo! I can actually answer this one. USB storage is the "internal" SD card. I know this because I added labels to them in Windows and tested this myself. So you have 2GB of internal storage (not an SD card) SD Card (the user-replaceable one) and then USB storage (the internal SD card.)
Yes, very confusing, and I'm glad I made this thread, because I found out I'm not an idiot. Okay, I still may be but not because I don't know the difference and/or usage. It seems there are at least a few others that got confused as well.
Entropy, so the naming convention is controlled by kernel and you can name that whatever you want? I'm for the switch, but maybe make two versions available? One with the old naming convention and one with the new. For the new, my suggestion would be to name all three something descriptive. IE:
internal storage = internal storage (it's 2GB, I don't think people confuse this much)
USB storage = permanent SD card or non-removable SD card
SD Card = external SD card or even removable SD card
I think that should be clear enough. One is internal storage... not an SD card. Out of the two SD cards, one is removable and the other is not. Simple enough.

resurrecting a dead thread
I'm curious why this has not been brought up...It appears with Custom ROMs we can have apps install direct from Play store to removable sd. We just need to properly partition the removable sd : http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1158993 .
I am actually looking into this practice. Does Shostock v4 not support such thing?
Also, folks who do partition their removable sd seem to favor amonRA over CWM...
Can someone shed some lights on this?

tora67 said:
I'm curious why this has not been brought up...It appears with Custom ROMs we can have apps install direct from Play store to removable sd. We just need to properly partition the removable sd : http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1158993 .
I am actually looking into this practice. Does Shostock v4 not support such thing?
Also, folks who do partition their removable sd seem to favor amonRA over CWM...
Can someone shed some lights on this?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
For starters that's a completely different device. Different manufacturer. HTC does things differently. They used to ship their phones with little storage like 4gb for OS and app install. They didn't provide gobs of onboard storage like Samsung.
Secondly that thread is over a year old.
AmonRA isn't available on this device. Again completely different devices, different methodologies.
The gs2 has plenty of storage and app install space available. Why does everyone think that installing your apps to external SD is a good thing?
Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 2

we want more space
I bet many like the OP would like apps and app data stored on their removable sd especially nowadays you can get a class 10 sd for cheap.

Have you noticed how many apps will not work at all with apps on the SD card?
If you have the apps installed on the sdcard and you plug into your computer the apps become unavailable and Widgets for those apps stop working.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

Pirateghost said:
. . . Widgets for those apps stop working.
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And I'm pretty sure you have to re-add them.

[Q] External SD Card Usage

Just got my E4GLTE and of course the first thing I did was root it, unlock it, and make a nandroid backup. I just moved from a Motorola Photon 4G and on that device the internal memory (pseudo sdcard) is mounted on /mnt/emmc and the external card is on /mnt/sdcard. Assuming you run out of app space in base memory, you can always move most of your app to the SD Card. Since the E4GLTE mounts the external SD Card on /mnt/sdcard/ext_sd, it appears that actual external storage can only be used for media or data where the app (or the system using the Storage tool) has a function to map to a different directory.
Have I described the situation properly? Does anybody else see the limitations this might pose or suggest workarounds?
..rob

bitbearmi said:
Just got my E4GLTE and of course the first thing I did was root it, unlock it, and make a nandroid backup. I just moved from a Motorola Photon 4G and on that device the internal memory (pseudo sdcard) is mounted on /mnt/emmc and the external card is on /mnt/sdcard. Assuming you run out of app space in base memory, you can always move most of your app to the SD Card. Since the E4GLTE mounts the external SD Card on /mnt/sdcard/ext_sd, it appears that actual external storage can only be used for media or data where the app (or the system using the Storage tool) has a function to map to a different directory.
Have I described the situation properly? Does anybody else see the limitations this might pose or suggest workarounds?
..rob
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Click to collapse
Yes I see this as a problem as well. I have looked into the vold.fstab file (where the system looks to see how it should mount partitions) but changing them just makes neither partition mount. I have a feeling that it might be something in the kernel but I will keep digging around.
Also if someone does figure it out how do you prefer them to be mounted? Internal as /emmc and external as /sdcard? Internal as /sdcard/int_sd and external as /sdcard? Maybe something else?

I guess it would depend how the apps and the kernel handle it, which of course, would vary with a custom ROM. Early builds of CM9 for the MoPho alternated back and forth, but there is also an option to swap what is internal and external as well. When it wasn't mounting at all, you could edit the vold.fstab, which would be my first inclination, so thanks for saving me that step!
I think, from most implementations I've seen, when a device has internal and external storage its been mounted as /mnt/emmc and /mnt/sdcard. Its like that on most of the custom ROMs I've used (on Nook, OG EVO, Hero, MoPho).
..rob

Im really lost on the whole external sd thing. I just want to be able to have my apps on there but android has made it seemingly impossible to do so anymore. Is there a write up or something on how this can be done with todays ICS?
Sent from my EVO using xda premium

/sdcard doesn't exist

Just got my Note (previous Epic user) and put in my SD card from that phone. Loaded up my apps as usual and went to fire things up and found... not much.
A bit of investigation revealed that the note uses the modular SD slot as 'external_sd', but there's no '/sdcard' visible on my Note right now (or rather /sdcard is the chroot location for my data storage and my apps are oblivious). I've seen reference to how there is a good size memory card built in, and that it uses the /sdcard/ location - which is why external_sd is necessary.
Most of my apps don't understand using the new structure.
I am checking out doing a move of all my contents from the 16gb 'external' card to internal space, but that raises a couple questions and concerns of mine:
1 - how safe is that internal memory from a wipe in the case of doing roms or factory reset - which normally does not touch the SD card?
2 - this pretty much ruins any sort of portability if the phone takes a nose dive and gets trashed, is there a way to swap mount locations of /sdcard and /external_sd (or make it /internal_sd instead) without hosing the system, or know of an alternative that makes the external SD useful again?

tigerknight said:
Just got my Note (previous Epic user) and put in my SD card from that phone. Loaded up my apps as usual and went to fire things up and found... not much.
A bit of investigation revealed that the note uses the modular SD slot as 'external_sd', but there's no '/sdcard' visible on my Note right now (or rather /sdcard is the chroot location for my data storage and my apps are oblivious). I've seen reference to how there is a good size memory card built in, and that it uses the /sdcard/ location - which is why external_sd is necessary.
Most of my apps don't understand using the new structure.
I am checking out doing a move of all my contents from the 16gb 'external' card to internal space, but that raises a couple questions and concerns of mine:
1 - how safe is that internal memory from a wipe in the case of doing roms or factory reset - which normally does not touch the SD card?
2 - this pretty much ruins any sort of portability if the phone takes a nose dive and gets trashed, is there a way to swap mount locations of /sdcard and /external_sd (or make it /internal_sd instead) without hosing the system, or know of an alternative that makes the external SD useful again?
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Click to collapse
1. Mine retains, with normal wipes, but if you odin you can wipe everything except external_sd
2. Just use tb to restore and you don't need to worry about the drive structure. I came from evo and it wasn't like the note, but never had your described issue using tb

tigerknight said:
Just got my Note (previous Epic user) and put in my SD card from that phone. Loaded up my apps as usual and went to fire things up and found... not much.
A bit of investigation revealed that the note uses the modular SD slot as 'external_sd', but there's no '/sdcard' visible on my Note right now (or rather /sdcard is the chroot location for my data storage and my apps are oblivious). I've seen reference to how there is a good size memory card built in, and that it uses the /sdcard/ location - which is why external_sd is necessary.
Most of my apps don't understand using the new structure.
I am checking out doing a move of all my contents from the 16gb 'external' card to internal space, but that raises a couple questions and concerns of mine:
1 - how safe is that internal memory from a wipe in the case of doing roms or factory reset - which normally does not touch the SD card?
2 - this pretty much ruins any sort of portability if the phone takes a nose dive and gets trashed, is there a way to swap mount locations of /sdcard and /external_sd (or make it /internal_sd instead) without hosing the system, or know of an alternative that makes the external SD useful again?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I advise if your coming from another device that you start fresh whether that is doing a FAT32 wiping your external and re-downloading your apps or just buy a new one. Internal memory is alot safer than external SD that could fail on occasion for various reasons. In any case if you are going to install custom ROM's the importance of a Nandroid backup cannot be overstated and back that up on your computer as well. It is pretty safe wiping your memory, Odin back to stock and then follow install procedures for the ROM you are installing per the OP from the Dev.

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