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Hey guys ive been lurking around for a while troubleshooting my builds, I have figured out that when I run my android build off of the sd card by itself everything runs well, but once i put in my 10GB of music everything starts to fall appart and i get sod after a minute or two in the lockscreen. I was wondering if creating a separate ext2 partition for android to boot from and keeping my data on the other partition would provide me with any more stability. BTW im using the stock 16 gig class 2 card that came with the phone
Where on the SD card is your music? Root or in the Android folder. I ask because I have a 2 year old 8GB class 4 SD card that came with my preloaded CGO8 navigation (ICO8, but for US) and have never formatted. I've loaded most of the Android builds and most I've had no problems, other than typical for the build.
SD cards are digital. Unlike analog hard disks data is not fragmented. Formatting does not serve a useful purpose for an SD card. Even deleting files (except protected) deleting is just as, if not more, effective.
Do some research, think independently to come up with your own conclusions, but these are mine.
Oh, by the way, this is not the right forum for your question....you should have done some research before posting.
i was not asking about formating i was asking about partitioning and if running android from an ext2 partition on the sd card would create more stability on the build
audscott said:
SD cards are digital. Unlike analog hard disks data is not fragmented.
Do some research, think independently to come up with your own conclusions, but these are mine.
Oh, by the way, this is not the right forum for your question....you should have done some research before posting.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Analog hard disks? No fragmentation on flash media? Wow, sounds like you need to do some research...
I also have the same issue where if I put Android along with my music on the 16gb card, it gets stuck at jumping to kernal on reboot.
im copying my music on the new sd now will report back if the problem persists, but i have a feeling that running off of an ext2 partition will provide us with better r/w speeds, similar to ubuntu running on an ntfs partition instead of ext4
Having music (anything else) on your SD card should not really affect Android. Most builds are in an 'Android' folder, so that is where the system looks for its information. This may slow things down a bit (just like an overloaded HDD) but generally there should not be much difference.
Creating and ext2 partition will not help. Of course, now that I have said that, I have an ext2 partition on my SD card that was left from using my rooted G1 with cyanogen mod and Apps2SD. By default, my android build on my HD2 automatically looked in that partition for apps (froyo does this).
So, I do not think it will change anything about freezing or 'jumping to kernal' but it does have its uses.
EDIT: And, since WinMo is actually booting android, I don't think containing your android stuff in an .ext2 partition would even work. Needs to be FAT32 for haret to see it. (this is my assumption, not necessarily a fact)
Isn't the rootfs.img file actually like a simulated ext2 filesystem? Doesn't this file emulate the device memory? I'm not exactly sure, maybe someone else can expand on this. I don't think there is any benefit to partitioning the card in the current state of the hd2's development. Maybe when we are able to flash nand, nand will be formatted to ext2.
polo735 said:
Isn't the rootfs.img file actually like a simulated ext2 filesystem? Doesn't this file emulate the device memory? I'm not exactly sure, maybe someone else can expand on this. I don't think there is any benefit to partitioning the card in the current state of the hd2's development. Maybe when we are able to flash nand, nand will be formatted to ext2.
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Click to collapse
Well, there is that and the system.ext2 and data.img. This is all the files in Android (basically).
But with these files, android knows where to look to find them, placing them in your own ext2 partition will hide them from android.
When we are able to flash to nand (and now) an ext2 partition will allow you to store apps on that partition, given you are able to move apps to SD, which is not currently possible in our builds.
I installed apps to my SD card on my G1 (on an ext2 partition), so when I used Froyo on my HD2, android was able to read from that partition and use my old apps. All that means is that I did not have to reinstall all my old apps, and save space in the data.img created by android.
audscott said:
Where on the SD card is your music? Root or in the Android folder. I ask because I have a 2 year old 8GB class 4 SD card that came with my preloaded CGO8 navigation (ICO8, but for US) and have never formatted. I've loaded most of the Android builds and most I've had no problems, other than typical for the build.
SD cards are digital. Unlike analog hard disks data is not fragmented. Formatting does not serve a useful purpose for an SD card. Even deleting files (except protected) deleting is just as, if not more, effective.
Do some research, think independently to come up with your own conclusions, but these are mine.
Oh, by the way, this is not the right forum for your question....you should have done some research before posting.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
First of all, before you call someone out you might want to do some research of your own so you don't come across looking like a moron. Fragmentation happens regardless of the actual hardware, and most file systems are vulnerable (whether it be fat, ntfs, ext2, ext4, etc). And while deleting files and reformatting end in the same result, a quick reformat makes far fewer writes to the card by simply wiping the allocation table. Each file name must be modified individually if you delete them, adding unnecessary wear to the card. As for a hard drive being "analog", it stores its data the same way as a memory card - 0's and 1's - which is digital. Just a little refresher there.
Now, as for the question at hand, which is completely appropriate for this forum as it directly concerns the development and installation of android on our HD2's, the use of ext2 for the android files has been done successfully on other winmo devices in order to increase stability and speed in the system. In fact I have done this very thing on my Kaiser in the past. Whether its possible with our current HD2 setup is another matter, so I'll direct you to these links - do a little reading and play around with it, let us know what you find. I'll probably look at it myself this weekend as a stop-gap until a full NAND flash becomes available, which hopefully is sooner rather than later - I'll report back if I find something.
http://www.androidonhtc.com/wiki/Installing_Android
http://android-devs.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=194&sid=69cc2d8c93262ff8c70de594d50e5874
In my own experience, I have a 4Gig class 10 and 16Gig class 2 (stock).
I use my 4Gig for Android test runs.
I use my 16Gig for my Android currently in use.
I have my Music in at the root /Music
Android is in the traditional /Android
Any pics I take I just move over /DCIM
I haven't experience any corruption. Before testing, I format the SD card on my computer with 64k or 32K blocks. I copy over my saved /Music and /DCIM and then load the new Android in /Android.
ALWAYS Eject the SD card. Keeping those rules and I haven't had issues.
Well I switched to my other 16gig class 2 and my problems went away, it seems the stock card was going bad but not using a 20yr old file system would be nice regardless
Sent from my HTC HD2 using XDA App
... oh, and about fragmentation, I'm not a software engineer (I'm electronics engineer), but I wouldn't get too worried about SD card fragmentation. It can happen, but not in the same way as a physical HD.
SD cards can do random access reads/writes much better than a physical hard drive. However, if you've formatted your blocks too small, the controller has to piece together two bits of info instead of one.
Example: 64k file written to 8k formatted SD, will have to piece together 8 blocks.
A 64k file written to 64k formatted SD is written all to one block.
The flip-side is if you have a bunch of small files (1k - 5k) and you're formatted at 64k, you've just wasted 63k of a 64k block writing a 1k file. It's inefficient.
willgill said:
Example: 64k file written to 8k formatted SD, will have to piece together 8 blocks.
A 64k file written to 64k formatted SD is written all to one block.
The flip-side is if you have a bunch of small files (1k - 5k) and you're formatted at 64k, you've just wasted 63k of a 64k block writing a 1k file. It's inefficient.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Considering the sizes of most music and picture files these days and the fact that all Android little files are inside one large file, I believe going with 64k blocks would be better. Even going with a larger block size than 64k might be a good idea. Too bad 64k is the limit.
Larger block sizes might be inefficient when dealing with system folders like C drive in windows or system folder in linux since they contain a huge number of small files. That is why windows default is 4k.
Hi, in the Nook Development forums, I found this post from Albert Wentz: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1439630
But unless I'm confused, I believe there are many other posts with other roll-your-own instructions? Such as: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1466583
All I want to do is build the SD card for my kid's nooks (versus paying $20 to N2A) so I can boot to it to run Android just like the N2A card. Does anyone know which post N2A may have followed to build their version? Or is Al's post the most modern build? Or the 2nd URL I list?
I'm quite technical so know I can do this, I just need to know which is the latest and greatest, or if there are many diff build customizations, which, let's say, is the most popular ? I mainly care that it has Google Play and Amazon App stores, and that I can sideload ebooks, mp3's,videos. If it comes with other apps, fine, but I'm fine with downloading,installing any I wish afterwards.
And.....some posts mention you don't have to modify your nook at all, just boot to the SD card, but others say it modifies the Nook (roots it), so that if you ever had to return it you'd have to restore it (hence best to back it up beforehand). Which is correct???
Al's method works fine. Anything you mentioned that you wish to try will work. I ran boot to SD android rom for several months before I took the plunge and rooted my 8gb Nook to a full android tablet.
It in no way modifies the internal workings of your Nook. The Nook allows booting to the card by design. Just use a Sandisk card of 8gb or more for best results and all you need is a class 4 speed rating. Believe it or not, a class 10 doesn't work as well.
YMMV
Good luck and have fun with it!
jaxn51 said:
Al's method works fine. Anything you mentioned that you wish to try will work. I ran boot to SD android rom for several months before I took the plunge and rooted my 8gb Nook to a full android tablet.
It in no way modifies the internal workings of your Nook. The Nook allows booting to the card by design. Just use a Sandisk card of 8gb or more for best results and all you need is a class 4 speed rating. Believe it or not, a class 10 doesn't work as well.
YMMV
Good luck and have fun with it!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
OK thanks, so if I understand you, rooting is a separate method, as in my 2nd URL referenced. (and in reading that, the SD card is only used to flash (or pull) the image from, to put onto your Nook.) I don't know about backup, but I don't think I want to mess with the stock OS for now. Maybe if B&N abandons it. I guess I don't see it as a big deal that my kids will need to reboot each time to toggle between nook OS and Android.
I read that about the Class4 vs 10. I think I even read posts about class 10's not only running slow, but acting really buggy? Is that right?... One of our SD cards is a 16GB class 4 and a 8GB class 6. Anyone heard if class 6's have any issues?
Extremely easy process to build a card similar to N2A to run a very stable CM10 from:
http://iamafanof.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/cm10-0-jellybean-sdcard-img-for-nook-tablet/
dtetner water
asawi said:
Extremely easy process to build a card similar to N2A to run a very stable CM10 from:
iamafanof.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/cm10-0-jellybean-sdcard-img-for-nook-tablet/
Ooops!
I just realized both URLs I posted (even 1st one from Albert) mention rooting.(altering tablet) My mistake. Ok, so where's the mainstream single post on XDA forums that describes the most popular non-root (boot to SD) process? I'd rather follow a post off XDA website. And if I have issues, maybe fallback to that URL you gave me, although his English is not so great, so afraid I might get lost in his partitioning instructions. I also don't have a Linux box at home (re: his mention of EXT4) although I have been trained on/worked with Linux some. Although running Jellybean since it's the latest & greatest sounds nice....although I've read enough articles from mainstream tech sites that state it's a bit too buggy? I'm sure ICS is plenty good enough and all apps support it.
Whats the difference between CWM (clockwork mod) and CM (cyanogen)? Wikipedia just says "The CyanogenMod source code repository also contains the ClockworkMod Recovery"
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The step by step you'll find somewhere here on XDA actually is the work of the guy I posted to. So my link is the source. That "Iamafanof" blogger is the person "Succulent" you'll see referred to here at XDA. Entirely up to you of course, but I don't see why you wouldn't at least check it out.
Edit:
You do not need a Linux system and I don't know what gave you the idea you would. The process is extremely simple: Download a rather large file, burn it to an sd-card, expand one partition (optional but recommended).
asawi said:
The step by step you'll find somewhere here on XDA actually is the work of the guy I posted to. So my link is the source. That "Iamafanof" blogger is the person "Succulent" you'll see referred to here at XDA. Entirely up to you of course, but I don't see why you wouldn't at least check it out.
Edit:
You do not need a Linux system and I don't know what gave you the idea you would. The process is extremely simple: Download a rather large file, burn it to an sd-card, expand one partition (optional but recommended).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I thought that because as far as I'm aware, the EXT4 that he mentions (for P3 Data1) is a linux type partition. (unless some Windows partitioning tool can create it I'm not aware of) I'm willing to try his steps. So I guess you'd recreate the "P3 FAT32 SDCARD" partition the same size as it was before then? And the P4 (EXT4) you'd resize, as you mention, to take advantage of all the rest of the space on your 8 or 16GB card. But what free tool under Windows can create EXT4 ?
baytee said:
And the P4 (EXT4) you'd resize, as you mention, to take advantage of all the rest of the space on your 8 or 16GB card. But what free tool under Windows can create EXT4 ?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You do not have to create any EXT4 partition. Nor any other other kind of partition. All you have to do is expand the FAT32 partition. MiniTool is free and will do that for you.
http://download.cnet.com/MiniTool-Partition-Wizard-Home-Edition/3000-2094_4-10962200.html
Edit: And, FWIW, I went and checked. Mini Tool can also create EXT4 partitions, should you want to.
I got that image onto the SDcard, it now has 4 partitions:
BOOT 249MB (FAT32)
350MB (EXT3) 91% used
600MB (EXT3) 3% used
SDCARD 713MB (FAT32)
13GB Unallocated
So I would right click partition "SDCARD", extend it to the 13GB.
But, in his post he mentions one partition (P3,DATA1, which MiniTool doesn't show any partition labeled as such, but I assume he's just talking about the 3rd partition (the 600MB Ext3 partition) being used to store just apps & app data. (I assume since it's EXT3 which is compat w/linux i.e. Android) If so, what do you think..is 600MB enough for downloading/installing lots of apps? Or is it wiser to extend it to maybe 2 or 4 or even GB? For example I have the Humble Bundle games for Android Tablet. The installs (APK) are huge...anywhere from 30-200MB themselves..... I assume their post-install size takes up a different amount of space (more) than the APK itself, just as with Windows EXE installers? And if I recall correctly I believe once installed, you can del the APK... Anyhow, I'm emailing the company to see what install reqs for disk space are, since all they list the APK size.
Only you know how large data partition you need but it sure looks like you need it larger than 600.
So, to add some sort of instructions:
Delete partitions 3 and 4 (the 600 and 713 MB ones)
Apply changes (top left)
Create a new partition 3. Make it EXT4, Primary and the size you want
Apply changes
Create a new partition 4, FAT32, primary to pick up whatever is left unallocated
Apply changes
Don't forget to "apply changes"
baytee said:
...
But, in his post he mentions one partition (P3,DATA1, which MiniTool doesn't show any partition labeled as such, but I assume he's just talking about the 3rd partition (the 600MB Ext3 partition) being used to store just apps & app data. (I assume since it's EXT3 which is compat w/linux i.e. Android) If so, what do you think..is 600MB enough for downloading/installing lots of apps? Or is it wiser to extend it to maybe 2 or 4 or even GB? For example I have the Humble Bundle games for Android Tablet. The installs (APK) are huge...anywhere from 30-200MB themselves..... I assume their post-install size takes up a different amount of space (more) than the APK itself, just as with Windows EXE installers? And if I recall correctly I believe once installed, you can del the APK... Anyhow, I'm emailing the company to see what install reqs for disk space are, since all they list the APK size.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Although all apps downloaded from Google Play will reside on /data partition, many apps keep their data separately in the internal user-media partition or on the external SDcard (the 4th /sdcard partition in your case). For example, I have a video game app which takes ~30MB for itself in /data but ~350MB for data storage on the SDcard. The Titanium Backup app works the same way. So you'll have to anticipate not just the app's storage size requirement but also its targeted partition for data storage.
Does this also work for CM 12?
Can these instructions be used with CM12 Lolipop?
panamamike said:
Can these instructions be used with CM12 Lolipop?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, if you can find a CM12 ROM image that was specifically compiled to run on SD.
Sent from my BN NookHD+ using XDA Premium HD app
digixmax said:
Yes, if you can find a CM12 ROM image that was specifically compiled to run on SD.
Sent from my BN NookHD+ using XDA Premium HD app
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Where can I find that ROM image? I haven't had much luck finding such a ROM, I haven't seen that specified.
panamamike said:
Where can I find that ROM image? I haven't had much luck finding such a ROM, I haven't seen that specified.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I am not aware of any CM12 SD-based ROM build for the Nook Tablet, but you can find CM11 SD-based builds for the NT at https://iamafanof.wordpress.com/category/nook-tablet-2/.
I dont know if there is already info on this subject, but i recently got a sandisk 64G mSD and it didnt even seem to last a year - kept getting into 'read-only' mode for some reason..... i though it was my KKDS_1.4 (4.4.4) rom, link2sd and all the other stuff there, but dont know if that's the case kept having to do the following to get it out of read only mode :
Plug SD into windows and :
Start > Run > cmd
type "diskpart" -> runs diskpart.exe from system folder
type "list volume" -> now you see all your connected drives, see which one is the drive
type "select volume #" -> # being the letter of your drive
type "attributes disk clear readonly" -> removing the protection
Then open your SD, you can now edit, delete, move files.
However this didn't seem to last long... and think the SDcard on its last leg - even though i didn't use it much.... i did have a ton of pictures, videos, programs and music on it but still had about 12G free but was really slow - even though its one of the SanDisk Ultra 64G XC I (UHS Class 1).... Granted I do use Link2SD and have partitioned the card as follows [59G Fat, 4G ext4, 1G Swap], but cant account for things taking so long, and then sometimes finding the card in read-only mode.
Anyhow... from my reading i dont think android will even use the 'swap' space i made, so on future SD I plan on a 4G ext4 (for second partition) with the remaining 60G as a FAT32, ExFat, or NTFS - for my KitKat (4.4.4) Device - will one filesystem be better an any other for the first partition (windows / linux compatible) - im thinking NTFS (reliable & windows compatible) but not sure if KK supports write mode to NTFS filesystem? There is also ExFat - but not sure about android support for that either... Know many people suggest raw FAT but just not possible with todays bigger cards so kinda seem stuck with FAT32.
Regressing and getting to the heart of my post here, I was wondering if there has been any long term studies of Which mSD Cards last longer and transfer data pretty fast? Perhaps there are ones more reliable... thought Sandisk was pretty good (my USB 3.0 SanDisk Extreme 64 GB Flash Drive kicks butt) I know the technology is different but the 64G Ultra SDXC was UHS Class 1. (so at least class 10)... but its only a year old and already giving me trouble... what are the better cards out there -- and what filesystem should the first partition be set to to make it last (and usable in a windows [or linux] environment) ?
I did read over a few good posts :
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1544156
and http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1150369
as well as a few other places here , here , here , and here
Im starting to think that since im using Link2SD perhaps class 10 card not optimal for the ext4 r/w , but i do use the primary partition quite a bit (like a flash drive ans dont want to wait eons while transferring all my tunes and videos etc to phone.....
Has anyone done any research into these issues? Are there any cards the use SLC nand? or just last longer?
Can anyone comment on any of this.
steve_77 said:
Anyhow... from my reading i dont think android will even use the 'swap' space i made, so on future SD I plan on a 4G ext4 (for second partition) with the remaining 60G as a FAT32, ExFat, or NTFS - for my KitKat (4.4.4) Device - will one filesystem be better an any other for the first partition (windows / linux compatible) - im thinking NTFS (reliable & windows compatible) but not sure if KK supports write mode to NTFS filesystem? There is also ExFat - but not sure about android support for that either... Know many people suggest raw FAT but just not possible with todays bigger cards so kinda seem stuck with FAT32.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I just answered on the other thread, but I wanted to add that AFAIK Android doesn't support NTFS (at least not without serious jigging) and I think exFAT is close to the same situation. Why? These are proprietary Microsoft formats (arguably FAT32 is as well, but it is based on the standard FAT16 and has been opened up considerably) that even for a Linux system have to go through hoops to get the drive to properly write (well, not too bad, install the ntfs-3g package).
Hello, I am still fairly new to using Kodi on the Android Mediabox and I would like to set it up so that it sends all data including cache to my external SanDisck Cruzer 64GB Flash Drive. I formattd it to exfat and used FolderMount to pair the app data folder, which now reads as 0kb on internal memory. Yet, there are still folders inside the org.kodi.xbmc path. I was wondring if I had done this correctly, and if not if I could get some help doing so. As well as editing a new xml. file to put in a larger cachemembuffer size. If i try to put in the amount of 18 gb in bytes in that field, I get an error of one or more files failed to play with Genesis. I have about 58gb of space to use on the flash drive. Thank you for your time
Having a little difficult in where all my storage is.
You never get full use to all your storage. For example I get 238GB of usable storage on my 256GB card, 30GB usable on my 32GB card, 7.4 GB on my 8GB card, 58GB usable on my 64GB card.
I can pull up dozens of examples cause I own several memory cards or devices with nand flash. What I understand is the unusable part of storage almost never exceeds 10%
So I'm applying the same rule to the v60. 128GB should mean I should expect to have 115GB usable storage give or take of my advertised 128GB.
I just formatted my v60, and maybe it's because I'm on a fresh install, but my device is telling me I have 95GB usable with 90GB free.
So on a fresh format, no caches built up yet, only 90GB free of 95GB usable, on a 128GB phone...
There are 25GB of storage space I'm missing... Where is it?
Are you forgetting to account for the space used by the OS and related bloat? My Verizon branded V60 shows 37 GB used by system files.
Mine shows total memory 256GB, free 176GB, used 80.48 GB, where system only is 29GB on European unlocked model.
Mr_Mooncatt said:
Are you forgetting to account for the space used by the OS and related bloat? My Verizon branded V60 shows 37 GB used by system files.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Im not forgetting, I want to know why 25GB is taken up for it.
The last LG device I owned was a G5, it's uncompressed rom was about 4GB. The most bloat-heavy rom I've ever encountered in my life was China's Miui 11, which uncompressed took up 7GB.
Just how much bloat does the v60 actually have to need a 25GB partition? Are you telling me the v60 rom really is that large?! Galaxy S20's compressed rom is only 3.8GB
Why is v60's Rom 25GB?
Ivalicenyan said:
Im not forgetting, I want to know why 25GB is taken up for it.
The last LG device I owned was a G5, it's uncompressed rom was about 4GB. The most bloat-heavy rom I've ever encountered in my life was China's Miui 11, which uncompressed took up 7GB.
Just how much bloat does the v60 actually have to need a 25GB partition? Are you telling me the v60 rom really is that large?! Galaxy S20's compressed rom is only 3.8GB
Why is v60's Rom 25GB?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just a guess, but probably related to the new seamless A/B updating, which takes up more space than prior versions of Android. It partitions what amounts to a second copy of the OS to your internal storage.
Mr_Mooncatt said:
Just a guess, but probably related to the new seamless A/B updating, which takes up more space than prior versions of Android. It partitions what amounts to a second copy of the OS to your internal storage.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
When did they start doing that?
Mr_Mooncatt said:
Just a guess, but probably related to the new seamless A/B updating, which takes up more space than prior versions of Android. It partitions what amounts to a second copy of the OS to your internal storage.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That and also the other partitions. You have vendor and oem specific partitions. Some of those also have A/B slots. They start getting bigger when a phone like this goes to many different carriers as the vendor partition will have folders that each carrier can activate for their own use through a config file and some may also be location specific. In all I'll bet there are over 30 different partitions and many of those are quite small.
See attached screenshot from xda. Shows the OnePlus 6 had 72 partitions when they implemented A/B OTA handling. Google introduced A/B OTA with Android Nougat. So has been around for quite some time.
Sent from my LM-V600 using Tapatalk
View attachment 5083793
Ivalicenyan said:
When did they start doing that?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think it became optional with Android 7.0 (I know it was Nougat), but not every manufacturer utilized it right away. I'd personally rather the old way to save the amount of storage used, but the main benefit is this ability to roll back if an OS update glitches.
pimpmaneaton said:
That and also the other partitions. You have vendor and oem specific partitions. Some of those also have A/B slots. They start getting bigger when a phone like this goes to many different carriers as the vendor partition will have folders that each carrier can activate for their own use through a config file and some may also be location specific. In all I'll bet there are over 15 different partitions and many of those are quite small.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's the first I've heard of this. I thought only carrier specific files for a given version were on the phone.