Samsung Galaxy A3, A5, A7 (2017) Adoptable strorage (use SD card as internal storage)

[dandreye]

Then, it is you the expert

ChatGPT is

You might be right, but I wonder on the opposite if the "encryptable=userdata" make it possible to encrypt the card such that the system can use it as adoptable. I guess that if you cannot read the card on linux / ext4 partition reader in windows, it might mean that the micro SD card is encrypted (and so is the phone).

Quite possible. Sadly there's little hope @ashyx himself will see this as his ID seems inactive and he was last seen here mid-2020...

ashyx

forum.xda-developers.com

 

[maxanthem]

ChatGPT is

Love it !

Did you manage to mount and read / write your card on a computer (Linux or Windows / WSL) ?

 

[dandreye]

Did you manage to mount and read / write your card on a computer (Linux or Windows / WSL) ?

After failing to open that single partition on it in Windows 11 and Ubuntu 18 I switched attention to dual partitioning as per that other thread and finally managed to create 2 partitions (albeit using yet another phone - Samsung S9+ as no other Samsung phone in my household could do it for some reason). So my card has ~30GB "portable" FAT32 partition followed by "internal" ext4 partition taking the rest of the space now. Unfortunately it didn't help make the latter one open in Windows/Linux and even the target Samsung A3 2017 phone won't see/adopt that partition alone - it just says "New SD card inserted" and prompts to format it (entirely) as internal or portable as usual. I decided to keep its dual partitioning intact for a day or two while awaiting answers on my questions in that other thread on it in case I'm asked to try this or that with it there. If no luck I'll probably revert back to a single partition to proceed/complete the experiments with it. Of a particular interest is whether at least TWRP can see it in Mount: I recall seeing "sdcard" there alongside system, data etc, but didn't try mounting it. Afaik TWRP's ability to take entire back up incl system and/or data is an indication of no encryption on them (which I personally evidenced with no-verity-opt-encrypt.zip before), so perhaps we could try this: install some app onto the "internal" partition of the card and see if it gets backed up.

As for WSL, in the recent past I unexpectedly struggled to set it up on my current laptop (got it working once elsewhere earlier this year, incl all that USB port mapping with usbipd) and didn't have time to proceed any further, so had to give up. Tbh I don't expect it to bring any benefits to the subject of our interest vs my Ubuntu 18 laptop, which I could upgrade to 20 or 22 if required.

Btw I'm somewhat surprised it's ext4 despite so many reports about f2fs being much faster. Perhaps it's f2fs in more recent Samsung phones though.. And one more thing that I noticed with this dual partitioning by S9+ is one more tiny partition immediately preceding the "internal" one and called android_meta as can be seen in the Diskinternals Linux Reader screenshot attached. Perhaps there's more to ext4 with Android unless it's something specific to the newer Android version on the S9+.

And one more idea on making it work with dual partitioning: perhaps we could let the phone format entire card to its liking and then just shrink that partition somehow to make room for the portable one that could be added manually.

 

[maxanthem]

After failing to open that single partition on it in Windows 11 and Ubuntu 18 I switched attention to dual partitioning as per that other thread and finally managed to create 2 partitions (albeit using yet another phone - Samsung S9+ as no other Samsung phone in my household could do it for some reason). So my card has ~30GB "portable" FAT32 partition followed by "internal" ext4 partition taking the rest of the space now. Unfortunately it didn't help make the latter one open in Windows/Linux and even the target Samsung A3 2017 phone won't see/adopt that partition alone - it just says "New SD card inserted" and prompts to format it (entirely) as internal or portable as usual. I decided to keep its dual partitioning intact for a day or two while awaiting answers on my questions in that other thread on it in case I'm asked to try this or that with it there. If no luck I'll probably revert back to a single partition to proceed/complete the experiments with it. Of a particular interest is whether at least TWRP can see it in Mount: I recall seeing "sdcard" there alongside system, data etc, but didn't try mounting it. Afaik TWRP's ability to take entire back up incl system and/or data is an indication of no encryption on them (which I personally evidenced with no-verity-opt-encrypt.zip before), so perhaps we could try this: install some app onto the "internal" partition of the card and see if it gets backed up.

As for WSL, in the recent past I unexpectedly struggled to set it up on my current laptop (got it working once elsewhere earlier this year, incl all that USB port mapping with usbipd) and didn't have time to proceed any further, so had to give up. Tbh I don't expect it to bring any benefits to the subject of our interest vs my Ubuntu 18 laptop, which I could upgrade to 20 or 22 if required.

Btw I'm somewhat surprised it's ext4 despite so many reports about f2fs being much faster. Perhaps it's f2fs in more recent Samsung phones though.. And one more thing that I noticed with this dual partitioning by S9+ is one more tiny partition immediately preceding the "internal" one and called android_meta as can be seen in the Diskinternals Linux Reader screenshot attached. Perhaps there's more to ext4 with Android unless it's something specific to the newer Android version on the S9+.

And one more idea on making it work with dual partitioning: perhaps we could let the phone format entire card to its liking and then just shrink that partition somehow to make room for the portable one that could be added manually.

This is a lot of inputs! Good luck with your research!

Let me know if you have some updates (maybe we can move to PM until we have something to share here )!
Maybe the shrinking trick could work.

 

[dandreye]

maybe we can move to PM until we have something to share here

Good point actually (was thinking about the same lately) - will keep you updated via PM then.

 

[maxanthem]

Hi @Asphyx, @dandreye and @jnflos!

I have bad news...
I was so proud to have my newly adopted storage (256GB) working for few weeks, and today I couldn't install an app on my phone: I reached the full capacity of the internal storage (see screenshot)
Wasn't it the whole point of having adopted storage?
I feel that the phone is putting the app on the "internal internal" storage anyways
I feel scammed by Samsung (once again)...

If you know a fix for this, I'd be glad to hear it! At least, before, I could move some apps to the SD card.

Thank you very much for your work!

 

[Asphyx]

Hi @Asphyx, @dandreye and @jnflos!

I have bad news...
I was so proud to have my newly adopted storage (256GB) working for few weeks, and today I couldn't install an app on my phone: I reached the full capacity of the internal storage (see screenshot)
Wasn't it the whole point of having adopted storage?
I feel that the phone is putting the app on the "internal internal" storage anyways
I feel scammed by Samsung (once again)...

If you know a fix for this, I'd be glad to hear it! At least, before, I could move some apps to the SD card.

Thank you very much for your work!

Not sure why I got this shoutout as I do not have this phone...
But in the past (I now have a Pixel 7Pro no SD Card but 512G of storage) you used to have to go into Settings/Apps and select a App and then select storage.
If the App supports moving to SD card the option should be available there.
Move what apps you can to SD Card and you should get back some Internal Storage space.

 

[maxanthem]

Not sure why I got this shoutout as I do not have this phone...
But in the past (I now have a Pixel 7Pro no SD Card but 512G of storage) you used to have to go into Settings/Apps and select a App and then select storage.
If the App supports moving to SD card the option should be available there.
Move what apps you can to SD Card and you should get back some Internal Storage space.

Hi,
Sorry for the out-of-nowhere bump I was still under the rollercoaster of emotions.
@jnflos who, for some reason, I can't tag, apparently presented in 2017 a method using your patch to give the option to Samsung Galaxy smartphones (2017 series) to offer adoptable storage.

The method you just referred to is typically what you do when the SD card is not adopted (ie when it is external storage).
When the SD is adopted, it should behave as one with the phone storage as one big internal storage. So the option to move app does not appear anymore, because the phone doesn't "think" it has an external storage, right?

At least on my side, the setting app crashes when I try to open the setting/apps/<any app>/storage
Maybe I can start to work with this!

Thank you for your help !

 

[alecxs]

When the SD is adopted, it should behave as one with the phone storage as one big internal storage. So the option to move app does not appear anymore, because the phone doesn't "think" it has an external storage, right?

No. opposite. external storage is required. it just switches external storage location from phone storage to adopted storage. AFAIK Samsung never supported Adoptable Storage, so OneUI is lacking that option.

 

[maxanthem]

No. opposite. external storage is required. it just switches external storage location from phone storage to adopted storage. AFAIK Samsung never supported Adoptable Storage, so OneUI is lacking that option.

Thank you for your reply
Indeed Samsung doesn't let you adopt a storage (by adopt I mean consider a SD card as internal storage). But thanks to this thread based on @Asphyx patch (Marshmallow) you can do it on Samsungs.

What I don't understand yet is how to fix my issue that despite having an adopted storage, my phone still put most of the apps on the build-in storage. I might try this method. Or I might end up rooting my phone and use Link2SD, however, I would lose the possibility to use my banking apps, which is not good :-(

 

[alecxs]

if you have any app that is moveable, you can move it to adoptable storage with 3rd party apps (no root). Link2SD provides this button too (alongside with its symlink method)

 

[lefti696]

@dandreye , Dear A320FL fellow!
Before entering the detail of how I did it, can you tell me two things?
A. Can you access the 128GB micro SD card from the phone (move data or app in the "normal" way as without adoptable storage)? Does the phone detect it?
B. The author (OP) indicated that it might be required to artificially corrupt the micro SD card to make the phone query to format it and then use as internal storage. It wasn't required in my case as the notification appeared, but did try it? Apparently you tried to delete all the partitions (all unallocated), but have you tried the second option: format it using the phone and stop with the back button before it finishes?

Now here is what I did (there might some unnecessary extra steps I guess):
0. The phone has the latest stock ROM, not rooted, without any extra (no TWRP for instance).
1. Authorize OEM unlock
2. Download mode → install TWRP (I had a linux computer, so I used Heimdall instead of Odin and payed attention to add a no-reboot option in the command line. The first attempt with reboot failed, and the phone restored the original recovery mode)
3. I tried to flash the adoptable storage enabler zip with TWRP, but then the phone didn't want to boot because of the "verification failed". (Maybe it's because I didn't wipe Dalvik cache after flashing the zip?)
4. I tried to wipe the whole data of the phone through TWRP, but the "verification failed" remained. That was before I found the post from Shameera_N.
5. I applied their fix:

• 5.1. In TWRP: wipe data (so that was the second time for me)
• 5.2. Reboot to recovery
• 5.3. Flash the no-verity-encrypt file
• 5.4. Reboot to recovery
• 5.5. Flash the adoptable storage enabler (so, second attempt, here)
• 5.6. Wipe Dalvik, Cache directly after

6. When I finally rebooted on the phone, I went through the first initialization / setup / google register (the data was wiped, remember).
7. I inserted the newly bought micro SD card (nothing had been written on it). The phone asked me if I want to use it as internal storage, and I said yes.

I assume that you followed step 5., in particular flashing the adoptable storage enabler zip at sub-step 5.5., in this case I case suggest to focus on corrupting the micro SD card. If you can see the micro SD card on the phone, do as I mentioned before (start to format via the phone and stop before it ends to corrupt it). If you cannot, create a partition / format it back on you computer and try again. (Possibly with the interrupted formatting trick.)

Tell me how it works out for you,

Have a good week!

Thanks for the guide.
Do you have files needed for flashing that you have mentioned? (or links to them) "no-verity-encrypt file" and "adoptable storage enabler"

 

[maxanthem]

Thanks for the guide.
Do you have files needed for flashing that you have mentioned? (or links to them) "no-verity-encrypt file" and "adoptable storage enabler"

Hi!

I found the no-verity-encrypt there (I took v6.1). The other one is attached to the head of this thread.
With more perspective after time, I decided to move back to my stock rom with adopted SD because it caused too many issues. For instance, as I mentioned before, it got full quite fast as well because even though the sd was adopted, most of the apps went in the internal part of it... I didn't try Link2SD but I'm expecting a lot from it. I guess that only movable can moved which is exactly what you can already do with stock rom.
I am considering removing more bloatware by force without root using adb.

I hope this helps
Keep me updated if things work for you!

Let's keep these A3 2017 alive forever!