This article is strictly for those of you with rooted phones. If you aren't rooted but want to get a little more out of your device that may happen to be a little less powerful than those released this summer, feel free to take a look at
what a rooted device can do. The
XDA community has lots of instructions and help on how to go about the process for your specific phone. If you're not interested in rooting, please feel free to check out any of the
previously written articles.
The best part about owning a smartphone is the ability to download and play with literally thousands of apps. However, a problem arises when your device runs out of space. This is especially problematic for those of us with older devices who don't have gigabytes of internal memory to spare such as the Droid X (8GB of internal memory!). I've been having this problem over the past few weeks, frequently getting the low disc space warning which haults any incoming text messages, voicemails and the downloading or updating of all apps.
I finally decided to do something about it and take advantage of the ability to
completely install all of my apps to the SD card. This is different than the feature built in Froyo, which doesn't completely do this. To give you an idea of how great the Apps2SD feature is: before going through with the process I only had 22.31 MBs of available space. After installing App2SD, I now have 92.86 MBs of available internal storage space left. Got your attention now 'ey? :-)
Below is a guide I put together due to all of the scattered information available out there. It took me forever to figure out how to do it the right way and hopefully this makes it much easier for anyone else going through the process. I used
tkirton's post to install
Darktremor Apps2SD and danfrance's guide from Android Forums.
This guide is for those of your using a ROM from Cyanogenmod.
- If possible, move all of your apps to the internal memory
- Make a backup copy of everything on your SD card and place it onto your computer
- Go to ROM manager and select "Backup Current ROM"
- Go to ROM manager and select "Partition SD Card"
- Select the size to be 512MB and the Swap = 0
- Download Darktremor's Apps2SD and place it on the root of your SD card
- Take the backup of everything from your SD card before the partition and place it back on to the card
- Reboot into recovery and flash Download Darktremor's Apps2SD
From what I've read, this should be all that you have to do. Check the links I posted if you're still having trouble. If your internal memory is still low then you'll probably have to use move your Dalvik cache to your partition as well. Instructions for that can be found here.
The only problem I'm having is getting my text messaging to work. I have no idea what I did and it's frustrating lol. I made a backup though so if I still can't get it to work I'll just put that back on. If anyone knows how to fix this problem, please let me know :-(
Labels: Android, Root
Image via Wikipedia
