The Jaded Tech

After hearing that a 4GB partition for my Apps was way too large (a bad feeling was felt when someone said “You’ll never need more than 600MB”…..strangely familiar…..) so I decided to do something about it.

The sure-fire way was to blow everything away and re-do it from the ground up.  Well, since that is the case, I had nothing to loose to try it another way.

Welcome GParted!  I knew there was a way to simply re-size partitions for regular HDs.  I understand that the process would work for an SD card but the difference I saw was that I was kinda messing with the OS part of the SD card.  Well, if this process screwed up, I’d simply have to do it the sure-fire way.

Fired up GParted, told it to change my 4GB/4GB into 6.1GB/1.8GB/66MB partitions.  Apps/Data/Swap respectively.  Little did I know how long it was going to take.  The first step was for GParted to shrink the 4GB Data partition down to 1.8GB.  That took 20 mins.  Of course I started this when I had to leave in 5mins for an appointment. <shrug>  was mildly annoyed that I had to leave the phone but did so.

I came back up an hour later and it was all done!  Some of the icons were showing a generic Android image (think broken image on windows) but that’s not overly surprising as I just rearranged everything in storage.  I rebooted the phone and bam, we’re were good to go!

CM5 has a number of new ways for dong things.  The lock screen is a slide to unlock type of deal.  Would have helped if I read the release notes I suppose before realizing that I had to slide it to get into my phone

So, we’ll see how long this configuration lasts before having to upgrade/change it.

At least I got Google Talk working again

Yes, I finally got it done right.  I finally hacked my Android phone and got Apps2SD working!  Woo-Hoo!@  Now I can install more than 6 apps!  It was getting seriously annoying, not to mention slow, having to get rid of the fun stuff  I bought an 8GB Class 4 MicroSD card so I can finally make good use of the phone.

So here is essentially what I did:

(Keep in mind that I had already rooted my phone before and recently was trying to get alternative ROMs but never quite got beyond swapping Cyanogen’s Recovery to Clockwork Mod’s recovery image)

Fixing my G1

1/ DL all files. CM 4.2.15.1, CM Recovery

2/ Flash Cyanogen’s Recovery

3/ Copy CM and flash rom

4/ Partition card

If you have cyanogens rom , the best way to partition your sd card is through the phone , through cyanogens recovery . Period . That’s how it was meant to be done with his roms . He says so himself . The process is fairly easy and quick.

Go to the terminal in cyanogens recovery , type ….

su

parted /dev/block/mmcblk0

rm 1

rm 2

rm 3 (if you have a third partition)

5/ Gparted is a part of Cyan’s latest recovery console.
disclaimer THIS WILL ERASE EVERYTHING ON YOUR SD CARD!!!! so back up first!!!

go into recovery , open the console , type….
su (press enter)
parted /dev/block/mmcblk0 (press enter)

(You’ll need to know the maximum amount of mb on your sd card so type):

print (press enter it will then enter your total mb on sd card, recommend you write down the max amount of mb for the card)

Then you want to delete the existing partition:

rm 1 (press enter)

Then create your primary partition, the numbers you input will vary depending on how many mb your card has:

mkpartfs primary fat32 0 xxxx

*(where xxxx = how much mb you want on fat32 part of sd card, example… ” mkpartfs primary fat32 0 3584″ [4096mb(total)-(512mb for ext2 partition)])

Then create the ext2 partition:

mkpartfs primary ext2 3584 4096

*(4096 being the total amount of mb on a 4gb card,
assuming thats the total given to you on the initial #print command)

And you’ve partitioned your memory card, no outside application needed.

Anyways , I just updated the guide to include updating your ext2 to ext3 !

In recovery go to the terminal , type ……

su
upgrade_fs
reboot recovery

Press repair ext filesystems , reboot , and you are at ext3

So now everything works according to plan.  Added a bunch of apps and still got tons of internal memory!  Yea!

So now I get to play

Given all the recent kerfuffle over Flash on Apple products (with wonderfully scathing headlines like “The Battle of Apple and Adobe‎” and “Adobe And Apple Continue To Fued Over Flash‎”) you’d think it’s a laymans techie internet WWIII going on.

Then I get this in my email today.

Is anyone else confused?  Geeze, you think these two companies are just a married old couple from a cheesy 60’s sitcom.