Partition SD card on Windows for people who can't be bothered to do it properly ;)

[alexhtclegend]

Firstly, BlaY0 has a great tutorial on how to do this properly, I suggest you do that to learn something.
Secondly, I cannot confirm that this is 100% safe. BlaY0's method should be 99% safe, I don't know about this as it is all automatic. BlaY0's method is tried and tested, this is not. I only used this method as I had a new SD card and I was in a hurry (exams coming up ) and I didn't have time to remind myself of BlaY0's method, and CWM only allows you to create up to 512mb partition. Also, I had a new computer, and I don't have time to set up ADB all over again.

Anyway, this is a method for people who don't want to use ADB to partition their SD card for A2EXT or DATA2EXT (a.k.a. apps2sd, etc etc), and are using Windows. If you're running linux, you could use something like gParted to partition it, not sure about OS X though. This method will allow a Windows user to create an EXT partition on their SD card alongside the FAT partition.

1) Download and install Minitool Partition Wizard, from here.

2) Open the program and delete all partitions from the SD card (which you will have inserted into the computer using an adapter or something). DO NOT DELETE THE PARTITIONS FROM THE HARD DISK! MAKE SURE YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DELETING. Oh, and make sure the SD card is backed up

3) Create a FAT32 primary partition. You decide how big you want it, but I'd advise you leave 1024mb (1gb) for the EXT partition.

4) Create an EXT2/EXT3/EXT4 (you decide) primary partition. Use up the rest of the space on the SD card.

5) Click assign/OK/whatever and wait for it to complete

6) You now have your partitioned SD card ready for an A2SD ROM!

7) You need to assign a drive letter to the FAT32 partition. Not sure about the EXT partition. At first I forgot to do this and my card didn't show up in Windows, though Partition Magic can still see it.

Like I said, do yourself a favour and use BlaY0's method here, but if you're lazy or you don't have time or ADB doesn't work anymore, use this.

 

[BlaY0]

Nice one m8. You mentioned that CWM doesn't offer adding partitions bigger than 512 MB. Well, you're right but that's why I made a customized version of fake-flash that can do bigger... to 1 GB. It can even add second ext partition for some exotic types of data2ext. On top of that I added auto block alignment which is described in my guide (the manual one) so no more calculations and manual labour

Sent from my HTC Legend

 

[alexhtclegend]

Nice one m8. You mentioned that CWM doesn't offer adding partitions bigger than 512 MB. Well, you're right but that's why I made a customized version of fake-flash that can do bigger... to 1 GB. It can even add second ext partition for some exotic types of data2ext. On top of that I added auto block alignment which is described in my guide (the manual one) so no more calculations and manual labour

Sent from my HTC Legend

Ah, I didn't know about your customized CWM, I think I'll just use that next time

 

[Dr.Romca]

Nice one m8. You mentioned that CWM doesn't offer adding partitions bigger than 512 MB...

I remember some version had the ext menu up to 4GB

On top of that I added auto block alignment which is described in my guide (the manual one) so no more calculations and manual labour

Didn't know that, good to know, for those of us still using data2ext, this is important...

 

[bonesy]

Wish this was up earlier, spent an hour repartitioning my card using parted.Couldn't upgrade to EXT3 and ended up using CWM 3.0.2.8 to do it instead lol

 

[BlaY0]

What CWM is using under the hood for partitioning is actually parted.

Sent from my HTC Legend

 

[QkSi1ver]

Tried it but it didnt work not sure what the problem is...
formatted my SD to FAT 32 and reserved 1G for EXT3 both as primary partition in the Mini Partition Tool
Plugged it in my phone,
Ran ADB shell
# a2sd --enabled, rebooted

on reboot nothing seemed to have changed... went back to ADB shell
tried a2sd --free it says A2Sd is not active ...
a2sd -- enabled again and it says it is enabled but not active

so im guessing it cant read or recognize the EXT3?!

Any clues... i didnt want to move my Dalvik to SD ... should I try EXT4 or even EXT2?

 

[alexhtclegend]

Tried it but it didnt work not sure what the problem is...
formatted my SD to FAT 32 and reserved 1G for EXT3 both as primary partition in the Mini Partition Tool
Plugged it in my phone,
Ran ADB shell
# a2sd --enabled, rebooted

on reboot nothing seemed to have changed... went back to ADB shell
tried a2sd --free it says A2Sd is not active ...
a2sd -- enabled again and it says it is enabled but not active

so im guessing it cant read or recognize the EXT3?!

Any clues... i didnt want to move my Dalvik to SD ... should I try EXT4 or even EXT2?

Take me through what you did, step by step. You say you reserved 1G for EXT3, but did you actually format it as another partition?

 

[Dr.Romca]

Any clues... i didnt want to move my Dalvik to SD ... should I try EXT4 or even EXT2?

It has been mentioned here like a gazilion times, boot up your device with logcat and see the first few lines...there is your answer!
Google how to wait for the device with logcat

 

[QkSi1ver]

1) Downloaded and installed Minitool Partition Wizard from your link. I got the free home edition

2) backed up my SD card and Open the program and delete my SD card partition ( which is in a card reader)

3) Created a FAT32 primary partition of 69xx MB and left the rest 1024 MB for the other unallocated space

4) Right click on the Unallocated Space to create an EXT3 as primary partition with the default cluster size.

5) At this point, it showed 2 partition on my SD, one with the drive letter for windows FAT32, and the 2nd one Ext 3 with 1GB and Primary. Clicked OK and Apply and wait for it to complete.

6) once complete , put it in phone, plugged usb and ran adb shell

7) ran a2sd --enable, it said reboot phone.. i made a mistake to reboot by adb the first time but then did the whole process again a 2nd time using reboot from the phone....

Tried logcat using this command "adb -d logcat>mylogfile.txt"
couldnt find the file anywhere ... if i dont redirect to the txt , it goes too fast to read and there's soo much debug messages what do i need to look for?

I thought it would save me time to get it done through windows... but its taking me as much time it w0uld probably get me with the manual way...
i'll give it a try tomorrow...



8) rebooted fine, and i was still low on space.. so went back in adb sheel to check a2sd --free but this is where it says not active..

 

[alexhtclegend]

1) Downloaded and installed Minitool Partition Wizard from your link. I got the free home edition

2) backed up my SD card and Open the program and delete my SD card partition ( which is in a card reader)

3) Created a FAT32 primary partition of 69xx MB and left the rest 1024 MB for the other unallocated space

4) Right click on the Unallocated Space to create an EXT3 as primary partition with the default cluster size.

5) At this point, it showed 2 partition on my SD, one with the drive letter for windows FAT32, and the 2nd one Ext 3 with 1GB and Primary. Clicked OK and Apply and wait for it to complete.

6) once complete , put it in phone, plugged usb and ran adb shell

7) ran a2sd --enable, it said reboot phone.. i made a mistake to reboot by adb the first time but then did the whole process again a 2nd time using reboot from the phone....

Tried logcat using this command "adb -d logcat>mylogfile.txt"
couldnt find the file anywhere ... if i dont redirect to the txt , it goes too fast to read and there's soo much debug messages what do i need to look for?

I thought it would save me time to get it done through windows... but its taking me as much time it w0uld probably get me with the manual way...
i'll give it a try tomorrow...



8) rebooted fine, and i was still low on space.. so went back in adb sheel to check a2sd --free but this is where it says not active..

Tbh I'm really not sure. One thing I forgot to mention in the guide is that you should assign a drive letter to the FAT32 partition or it won't show up in Windows. I didn't assign one to my EXT4 partition though, and DATA2SD is working great for me. Try deleting all partitions from the SD card and start again. It'll only take 10 minutes, and if it still doesn't work just use the manual way.

Sorry.

 

[QkSi1ver]

Tbh I'm really not sure. One thing I forgot to mention in the guide is that you should assign a drive letter to the FAT32 partition or it won't show up in Windows. I didn't assign one to my EXT4 partition though, and DATA2SD is working great for me. Try deleting all partitions from the SD card and start again. It'll only take 10 minutes, and if it still doesn't work just use the manual way.

Sorry.

Yeah i assigned a drive letter to FAT32...
Also the FAT32 , was my first block allocated partition, the 2nd partition was EXT3... i will redo the whole process and recreate EXT4 instead.

"DATA2SD is working great for me" ... you mean "A2SD working great for me" ... right? unless i'm missing something else that i needed to run..


ps: I recalled, after it was not working, i took out the sd and put it back in the reader to open MiniTool, it showed EXT2 instead of EXT3 ( which i was sure i chose )... and what's weird is it was reporting used space like 41MB... so obvisouly, the ROM wrote something on it...
Formatting it again to EXT3, didnt delete the 41 Used space, but it did convert it back to EXT3 ...probably nothing but mentioning as well

 

[alexhtclegend]

Yeah i assigned a drive letter to FAT32...
Also the FAT32 , was my first block allocated partition, the 2nd partition was EXT3... i will redo the whole process and recreate EXT4 instead.

"DATA2SD is working great for me" ... you mean "A2SD working great for me" ... right? unless i'm missing something else that i needed to run..


ps: I recalled, after it was not working, i took out the sd and put it back in the reader to open MiniTool, it showed EXT2 instead of EXT3 ( which i was sure i chose )... and what's weird is it was reporting used space like 41MB... so obvisouly, the ROM wrote something on it...
Formatting it again to EXT3, didnt delete the 41 Used space, but it did convert it back to EXT3 ...probably nothing but mentioning as well

I suggest you start over, something seems to have gone wrong.

A2SD is where the apps are stored on the EXT partition.
DC2SD is where the dalvik cache is also stored on the EXT partition.
DATA2SD is where the entire /data partition on the phone is stored on the EXT partition of the memory card.

Partitioning the SD card with a FAT32 partition and EXT partition is done first, then you decide which one is for you. DATA2SD does have one or two issues, such as the risk of corruption - you'd then have to completely reinstall the ROM. A2SD and DC2SD are fine but I still found myself running out of internal memory.

 

[QkSi1ver]

i gave up and used ROM Manager to create my partition ...i couldnt set it to 1G because 512MB is maximum but it was painless to create.

it asked me to create a swap partition... i've read somewhere that swap partition is useless or barely used in newer android os? do you guys have any swap partition if so how big are they?

Also, did you move Dalvik cache to sd? isnt it slower on SD? i mean shouldnt dalvik cache be on RAM whihc i assume is faster than any external sd?

thanks for your insight

 

[alexhtclegend]

i gave up and used ROM Manager to create my partition ...i couldnt set it to 1G because 512MB is maximum but it was painless to create.

it asked me to create a swap partition... i've read somewhere that swap partition is useless or barely used in newer android os? do you guys have any swap partition if so how big are they?

Also, did you move Dalvik cache to sd? isnt it slower on SD? i mean shouldnt dalvik cache be on RAM whihc i assume is faster than any external sd?

thanks for your insight

I used the full DATA2SD, which includes Dalvik2SD.

 

[xxxjistxxx]

ok so sorry for a double post but im having an issue partitioning.
32 gb card san disk brand new
primary Fat32 10gb
primary Ext2 rest of space
once mini tool is done it sats successful but shows the sd card as Bad disk?!?
is there somthing im doin wrong? is used this guide here http://forum.xda-developers.com/wiki/SD_card_partitioning
all help deeply appriciated
Acer Iconia Tab A110 rooted, Cwm, 4.1.2

 

[ranger4740]

Can you actually have a 22gb ext partition? This might be something to look into to see if you can do it.

Edit: this got me interested so I searched myself, yes you can but apparently it depends on the chosen block size and hardware limitations, so u may have an issue with either.
Sent from my Legend using xda app-developers app

 

[leafwarbler]

Firstly, BlaY0 has a great tutorial on how to do this properly, I suggest you do that to learn something.
Secondly, I cannot confirm that this is 100% safe. BlaY0's method should be 99% safe, I don't know about this as it is all automatic. BlaY0's method is tried and tested, this is not. I only used this method as I had a new SD card and I was in a hurry (exams coming up ) and I didn't have time to remind myself of BlaY0's method, and CWM only allows you to create up to 512mb partition. Also, I had a new computer, and I don't have time to set up ADB all over again.

Anyway, this is a method for people who don't want to use ADB to partition their SD card for A2EXT or DATA2EXT (a.k.a. apps2sd, etc etc), and are using Windows. If you're running linux, you could use something like gParted to partition it, not sure about OS X though. This method will allow a Windows user to create an EXT partition on their SD card alongside the FAT partition.

1) Download and install Minitool Partition Wizard, from here.

2) Open the program and delete all partitions from the SD card (which you will have inserted into the computer using an adapter or something). DO NOT DELETE THE PARTITIONS FROM THE HARD DISK! MAKE SURE YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DELETING. Oh, and make sure the SD card is backed up

3) Create a FAT32 primary partition. You decide how big you want it, but I'd advise you leave 1024mb (1gb) for the EXT partition.

4) Create an EXT2/EXT3/EXT4 (you decide) primary partition. Use up the rest of the space on the SD card.

5) Click assign/OK/whatever and wait for it to complete

6) You now have your partitioned SD card ready for an A2SD ROM!

7) You need to assign a drive letter to the FAT32 partition. Not sure about the EXT partition. At first I forgot to do this and my card didn't show up in Windows, though Partition Magic can still see it.

Like I said, do yourself a favour and use BlaY0's method here, but if you're lazy or you don't have time or ADB doesn't work anymore, use this.

Hahah! Thanks for you detail guide. It is so helpful for me!