How to partition your HTC EVO microSD card for Darktremor Apps2SD
This guest tutorial was written by MildlyDisturbed.
So, you're constantly getting a warning on your HTC EVO that you're low on internal storage space. You have a lot of free space on that 32GB microSD card you upgraded to and are frustrated that your rooted EVO is being such a pain and limiting you to a shared program and ROM space of ~500MB (amount varies by ROM). You've moved all that you can to the card and are still running with less than 50MB of free internal memory (hello wife, I love you; please let me root your phone and fix this).
If you're up for performing brain surgery on your EVO, then what you'll find below is definitely for you. If successful, you could end up with a little over 4GB of storage space on your phone thanks to a little gem called Darktremor Apps2SD. If you're unsuccessful, well, you'll be cursing my name and probably asking Jenn to hunt me down and kill me; fortunately, she's several thousand miles and the Pacific Ocean away from me.
What you're going to do is partition your SD card into two segments: one will be FAT32 (as it is now) and the other will be EXT2, EXT3, or EXT4, depending on how nutty you want to go.
Before you do this, and before I explain how this is going to be done, it's very important that you back up your SD card. Anything that is on that card right is going to be going away, never to return.
If you're not certain how to back your stuff up to your computer and retrieve it later, then please stop reading and don't attempt to do this. Seriously, you're about to go mucking about with the laws of time and space here. I suggest knowing how to back up your photos, videos, and apps that are on the card. You should also know how to use ADB (or have a microSD card reader/writer) before attempting any of this.
- Back up anything on that SD card. It's going to be empty in a minute.
- Download a Darktremor App2SD-compatible ROM like CyanogenMod, Savaged-Zen, or Vaelpak and save it to your computer. Note: Vaelpak has it built in, so you can skip this installation section.
- Download Darktremor Apps2SD from XDA and save it to your computer.
- Bookmark the installation instructions on your computer's browser and refer to them often.
- Get ready to lose every bit of data on your SD card because it's going to happen now. Reboot into recovery. I suggest using Amon Ra recovery for this, as ClockworkMod seems to be missing a couple of very useful bits.
- Select Partition SDCard. You'll want a partition of about 512MB to 1GB. Keep in mind that the ROM you downloaded to your computer in step #2 is not going to be stored here, so you're up a good 100-200MB already. You can also set a swap partition if you want, but from what I've read, that's generally just a waste of space.
- If you're using ClockworkMod, you probably don't have the option to upgrade from EXT2 to EXT3, but you can select to do that should you decide you want to. EXT2 is not a journaling file system, but EXT3 is. 3 offers more reliability and 2 offers more speed.
- If your ROM supports it you can upgrade it to EXT4, but you'll have to consult your ROM for that and you can do it later if you decide it's needed.
- Put your new ROM and the Darktremor Apps2SD image on your SD card. You can do this in a number of ways:
- Mount the EVO as a disk drive if your existing ROM is still able to function.
- Plug the EVO into your computer with USB debugging turned on and push the files via ADB.
- Take the card out, insert it into a card reader hooked up to your computer, and copy the files over to it (the only partition that will show will be the FAT32 partition).
- Download the files over the air if your existing ROM is capable of booting and downloading.
- Flash the ROM, flash Darktremor, then boot your EVO.
If you're restoring backups made with Titanium Backup, make sure "restore to original location" is not turned on. You will also notice a new graph in Titanium called "SD Card (a2sd)," which will show the size and fullness of the new partition.
Some important things to note:
- After installing Darktremor Apps2SD, all apps that show up as installed on the EVO are actually installed in the sdext partition. If you click to move them to the SD card, what you are doing is removing them from the Darktremor partition and moving them to the SDCard/Android_secure folder. This evidently causes some problems.
- If you're running a ROM that already supports Darktremor (like Vaelpak), well, you can skip the flashing of a new ROM. There have been a lot of reports of things behaving badly after being moved via A2SD Install, though.
Too complicated? Well, you can generally skip having to do all of the above by choosing a nice ROM and not installing a billion programs. Generally.
