How can I use an SD Card to increase the storage space of a Y300?

[Guest RoboJ1M]

I originally (mistakenly) posted this in the development sub-forum for the Y300, if a mod could delete that for me, that would be great, ta.

 

Hi,
 
It's been a long time since I've dealt with such a space limited device as the Y300.
I've installed Expert V4 and it's stable and fast, but you very quickly run out of storage space.
Now I remember (on my HTC Desire) that you used to create a partition labelled sd-ext on the SD card, then use a script to mount points at places like /data which pointed at the sd-ext partition.
 
I always used the helper app Mounts2SD, which appears to be a cut above everything else.
 
That was back in the Android 2.x days, now there appears to be a toggle switch for utilising the SD card as internal space.
However, on the Y300 it seems the internal eMMC has a 1GB partition mounted as an SD card.
So I see TWO SD cards in storage and checking that box doesn't do anything useful, it seems to just use the fake SD card partition.

 

It seems unlike the Desire you can't just flash a different hboot with the Y300 and reclaim space (which would be nice, you could just use LVM then!) 
I've read some posts about how you're supposed to just insert an SD card and toggle the "Use SD card as Internal" switch, but certainly this is not solving the space issues.

 

Installing Mounts2SD works, and you can see there is an sd-ext partition being used but it's the internal MMC's fake SD card.

What happens if you add an sd-ext partition to the SD card and have two? Can you chose which one to use?

 
SanDisk's Extreme Pro microSD cards sustain about 2.5MB/s for 4K random reads and writes, so I'm hoping to use all the space for sd-ext and put everything on the card, including /sdcard/0

Then it's more like a permanent disk in a non-sd carded device like my Nexus4.

 
Thanks,
 
J1M.

[Guest davorix]

Here is my solution (i am on SlimKat): External SD-Card 16GB, 15GB formatted FAT32, 1GB formatted FAT32, both primary Partitions. Then this toggle switch on. This sets your SD-Card as your favorite Location instead of the integrated fake SD-Card (so you see two SD-Cards, but you only use the "real" SD-Card. You end up with four storages "internal", "internal SD", "external SD", "SD-ext"). Then I installed Link2SD and used the 1GB Partition as SD-EXT, so this will be added to "internal". Weirdly that does only work with a FAT32 partition, not with ext2/3/4. Flashing a new HBOOT with bigger internal space would be the nicer solution, but as long as this works ;)

 

BTW: I had the Desire as well, nice phone, til I did slipnslide with it in my Pocket and it refused to connect to any WiFi afterwards...

Edited November 11, 2014 by davorix

[Guest bluebird1927]

I thought all you need to do is go to settings > storage then hit the top right hand corner to swap internal SD with SD card. If im missing the point my apologies.

[Guest fartfire]

Just install LinkSD and move any big application to SD card. That is what I do.