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Flirting with CM7 -- Notes and Observations

I have been a big fan of VEGAn Ginger -- sure it has some issues but it works pretty well. But recently I was wondering how much of an issue would it be to install CM7.02, the VTL Launcher, and whatever other extras and just keep up to date.
I did and for the most part it works the same. A few things were FC that didn't on VEGAn and a few things worked that FC on VEGAn. No big difference on too many things.
However, two issues came up.
1) CM really wanted to install ROM Manager. The CM forum implied it works ok so I tried it. It DOES work on my system but it expects everything on /mnt/emmc which was a pain since all my backups and recovery were on the external sdcard /mnt/sdcard2 in VEGAn and /mnt/sdcard in CM7. What's worse is apparently it will refuse to flash over it self with an old version! So it wasn't insurmountable, just required me to move everything for awhile. But I finally got tired of it and reflashed good old bekit 0.8 using nvflash. So if you experiment, be sure you have a backup of partition 9 (clockwork mod) or you know how to unpack the ZIP file and flash it.
2) This brings up an interesting issue. I was going to try it but I didn't because I realized I'd have to repack the root directory and I didn't want to do it. But if the Gingerbread ROM repackagers were interested this would be easy for them to do. I'd propose having 3 directories in /mnt (well, plus the others, but 3 we are interested in): /mnt/emmc /mnt/sdcard /mnt/sdcard2
What you would do is let CM7 mount /mnt/emmc as always and change vold.conf to mount the external card at /mnt/sdcard2. Then you bind mount /mnt/emmc over /mnt/sdcard. That way you have the exact same filesystem at /mnt/emmc and /mnt/sdcard and in CM7 and the other ROMs it would "just work" since regardless of where you were looking for the SDCARD you'd wind up with the internal unless you looked for sdcard2.
I understand not all devices have big internal SD and that's why CM is set up the way it is, but if we are mucking with the mount scheme anyway, why not like this?
I may go in and try it again if I reinstall CM7. Without having to recast the ROM you'd have to put a userinit script in that DID not block but would spin off a process to wait for /dev/emmc to mount and then moved /mnt/sdcard to /mnt/sdcard2 and then created /mnt/sdcard again and did the bind mount. This requires a remount of root to make it writeable, etc. Kind of a pain.
Something like this (untested):
#!/system/bin/sh
( until mount | grep -l sdcard
do
mount -o remount,rw / /
mv /mnt/sdcard /mnt/sdcard2
mkdir /mnt/sdcard
chown 1000 /mnt/sdcard
chgrp 1015 /mnt/sdcard # whatever sdcard_r gid is? 1015? 1025?
chmod 076 /mnt/sdcard
mount -o bind /mnt/emmc /mnt/sdcard
mount -o remount,ro / /
done ) &
Something like that. Would be easier if you could just get vold to mount on sdcard2 to start with and have /mnt/sdcard and /mnt/sdcard2 already created in /mnt.
Just a thought.
By the way, another trick like this that I do is to mount sdcard2 as a subdirectory of sdcard. That works great EXCEPT when you USB mount the tablet it never works until you unmount. Not a big deal but a pain.

Good suggestion, but it's easier to just symlink /mnt/sdcard to /mnt/emmc and mount the internal SD card there--assuming that vold does not check that the mount point is not a symbolic link. The external SD card can be mounted on /mnt/sdcard2.
However, this might be a temporary problem. Google, for Gingerbread, wants the removable SD card on all devices, whether cell phone or tablet, to always be mounted on /mnt/sdcard (or /sdcard) and the internal SD card to be mounted elsewhere (/mnt/emmc, I believe), which is why Gingerbread-based firmwares like CM7 have /mnt/emmc and /mnt/sdcard as mount points.
In 6 months, hopefully, everybody will be on Gingerbread+ and the current multiplicity of possible mount locations will cease to be an irritation.

you have emmc and sdcard mountable right now. you can also mount a usbdisk. you can have 2 mounts going at the same time currently.

Screenshots? Last I checked (7.0.2) you still could not take a SS by any method on CM7.
That's pretty much why I'm on VEGANginger.
I used the vold.fstab.zip thing floating around here or on the CM forums to change the fstab on CM7 to be like VEGANtab/froyo for mounting the internal sdcard - makes all the 3rd party apps happy.

schettj said:
Screenshots? Last I checked (7.0.2) you still could not take a SS by any method on CM7.
That's pretty much why I'm on VEGANginger.
I used the vold.fstab.zip thing floating around here or on the CM forums to change the fstab on CM7 to be like VEGANtab/froyo for mounting the internal sdcard - makes all the 3rd party apps happy.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Same thing here, it makes almost everything back to normal, unless you try to use ROM Manager automagically, which will fail.

rajeevvp said:
Good suggestion, but it's easier to just symlink /mnt/sdcard to /mnt/emmc and mount the internal SD card there--assuming that vold does not check that the mount point is not a symbolic link. The external SD card can be mounted on /mnt/sdcard2.
However, this might be a temporary problem. Google, for Gingerbread, wants the removable SD card on all devices, whether cell phone or tablet, to always be mounted on /mnt/sdcard (or /sdcard) and the internal SD card to be mounted elsewhere (/mnt/emmc, I believe), which is why Gingerbread-based firmwares like CM7 have /mnt/emmc and /mnt/sdcard as mount points.
In 6 months, hopefully, everybody will be on Gingerbread+ and the current multiplicity of possible mount locations will cease to be an irritation.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Symlinks don't work for everything -- especially any FS that is VFAT. Bind mounts always work even through a chroot, etc. I don't think you can mount on top of a symlink either although I could be wrong. Same problem with trying to symlink /mnt/sdcard/sdcard2 => /mnt/sdcard2. The sdcard FS is VFAT so...

schettj said:
Screenshots? Last I checked (7.0.2) you still could not take a SS by any method on CM7.
That's pretty much why I'm on VEGANginger.
I used the vold.fstab.zip thing floating around here or on the CM forums to change the fstab on CM7 to be like VEGANtab/froyo for mounting the internal sdcard - makes all the 3rd party apps happy.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
screen shots are in cm7 now.

wd5gnr said:
Symlinks don't work for everything -- especially any FS that is VFAT. Bind mounts always work even through a chroot, etc. I don't think you can mount on top of a symlink either although I could be wrong. Same problem with trying to symlink /mnt/sdcard/sdcard2 => /mnt/sdcard2. The sdcard FS is VFAT so...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No, symlinks will work in this case because the link in not on the VFAT filesystem--it's outside it. And, you can mount through a symlink.

pershoot said:
screen shots are in cm7 now.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hm... they didn't work in 7.0.2 when I flashed it. So they're in the nightly since? I could flash over and kick the tires.

[Q] SD Card will not mount after ext4 part.

Attempting to partition sd card with ext4 -a process I completed multiple times successfully on a Nexus One, the process appeared to complete but now the phone will not mount the sd card. I've tried a wipe/reset, to no avail. I can still access and partition the sd card through adb, but the phone cannot mount it to format/partition, restore from recovery, partition sd-card from within ClockWork Recovery, nothing. I've re-partitioned the sd card through adb, which indicated a successful completion, but the phone still refuses to mount the sd card. If this weren't a Nexus S with it's cursed internal sd-card I would simply swap out the sd card with another or format it externally like all the google topics I pull up on the subject suggest.
Is this fixable or has the fused sd-card scenario become a liability?
Common Error messages:
Can't mount /sdcard
Can't mount /sdcard/.android_secure
Phone: Nexus S (US, T-Mobile, manufactured Dec. '10)
Recovery Img: ClockworkMod Recovery 3.0.2.4
Rom: CM 7.0.3 (now wiped, cannot put back on since sd card won't mount)
fstab:
/dev/block/mtdblock4 /cache yaffs2 rw
/dev/block/platform/s3c-sdhci.0/by-name/userdata /data ext4 rw
/dev/block/platform/s3c-sdhci.0/by-name/system /system ext4 rw
/dev/block/platform/s3c-sdhci.0/by-name/media /sdcard vfat rw
Can mount everything except the last one, /sdcard.
I've tried all the recommended procedures garnered from the first 10 or so pages in google, xda, cyanogem forum, etc:
Restore from nandroid: Not possible, can't mount the SD,
Wipe/Reset: can't wipe /media as sd card won't mount,
partition sd card from within Clockwork: indicates success but does nothing,
format from within clockwork: unable to mount,
repartition using adb: works, parted can see them, I can move files to from, but the phone will not mount,
clearing fstab: no effect,
Fastboot works, but I don't have the proper images. ADB works, as do the installed utilities. Have not tried ODIN as again, I don't have the proper images. Should I attempt to compile my own images from source?
Update: SOLVED, Microsoft Windows. To whom it may concern: I was able to mount the /dev/block/platform/s3c-sdhci.0/by-name/media from two different laptops running OSX and Fedora/Ubuntu then successfully been able to partition them with fat32 as the ClockworkMod (and maybe Cyanogen?) expect with 0 progress. Then I pulled out an old Windows machine, installed the JDK/ADK's +tools and performed the same procedure and that time it worked. I'm uncertain as to what particular quality a 'genuine' Windows formatting provides, but either this phone or the particular software combination I'm running require it. I was able to mount & re-partition the /sdcard in Clockwork, then manually remove rebuild them and upgrade to ext4 using tune2fs as usual. In the interim for work and such, I had to find a surrogate (for the SIM) and could only find and old k750i (which still had a full charge and worked flawlessly all day, btw). Wow phones used to be small.
I think I was missing something about the way ClockworkMod handles fstab, because everytime I would modify it specifically to the specs I passed to parted while creating the partitions with mkpartfs, it would either ignore or overwrite them. So be careful messing with the sd-card, the S's aren't like the One's in the sense that if you screw it (the sd-card) up or it goes bad you can't just take it out and format it in another machine/phone, you have to appeal to ClockworkMod. ODIN $ucks by the way, I found fastboot to be much more effective.

If you format the sd partition ext4, then you should change the fstab too.
from
Code:
/dev/block/platform/s3c-sdhci.0/by-name/media /sdcard vfat rw
to from
Code:
/dev/block/platform/s3c-sdhci.0/by-name/media /sdcard ext4 rw
or from
Code:
/dev/block/platform/s3c-sdhci.0/by-name/media /sdcard auto rw
The 2nd last entry there is the file system type.
Likely, this would have solved your problem.
Of course, I don't know, whether the recovery has the vfat type in fstab. You might have to change it there too. On my linux box auto works very well in fstab.
Of course, if you partition your sd partition ext4, you won't be able to use it as usb memory from windows. (At least I am pretty sure you can't, haven't tried)

Well of course I couldn't let it die, I went back and started tinkering again now that I have a way back. I can't change the fstab it seems, whatever I change it to gets over written everytime either Clockwork or the Rom starts. It's weird, I know I'm missing something and I don't know much about CWMod. (had Amon_Ra on the N1, which had the nifty fsupgrade script)
The 2nd last entry there is the file system type.
Likely, this would have solved your problem.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm quite familiar with unix style fs and fstab, it's the stubbornness I'm not used to. I'm also spoiled by vi and nano. CW has some nice scripts built in as well though.

[Guide] [Stock] [Cyanbook] [Any ROM] SWAP Internal & External for MMX Funbook (P300)

[Guide] [Stock] [Cyanbook] [Any ROM] SWAP Internal & External for MMX Funbook (P300)
This method should also work on other android devices also. But try at you own risk.
Many Scripts are available on Internet to swap internal and external memory of stock ROMS but they may not work on some other custom ROMS like CyanBook by karndev
I am sharing a method to swap internal and external memory of any Custom ROM. Best when done just after installing ROM.
Your Device Should be Rooted. If You do not know what it is, stop here and google it
NOTE: If you do not follow it properly, your device will be bricked. Complete Backup is Recommended
Lets Start, Here are the Steps:-
1. Install ES File Explorer
2. Run ES File Explorer
3. Go to "Settings"
4. Go to "Root Settings"
5. Tick on "Root Explorer".
6. A warning message will pop up saying "When 'SU Request' dialog popup. please select.....", Click on Yes
7. Now Tick on "Mount File System" (Mount / , /system as writable)
8. Your Settings of ES File Explorer is Complete. Now come back on ES File Explorer's main screen.
9. Click on Star Icon (Favorites) on top left side.
10. Click on Phone Icon ("/' written bellow it)
11. Now you are in "/", now click on "system" Folder
12. now click on "etc" folder.
13. Now you are in "/system/etc/" folder, verify it from "Address bar of ES File Explorer" at the top.
14. Click on "vold.fstab" file. Open it as "Text"
15. Select ES Note Editor.
Most Difficult Part Starts From Here. If done incorrectly, Your device will be bricked.
16. Come to last 3-4 lines of the file. (Starting from dev_mount)
About vold.fstab file
(vold.fstab file is executed during booting. It defines the mounting location of internal SD Card, external SD card and USB Pendrive etc. By changing this file we can change the mounting location, and hence swap internal and external memory).
Format of vold.fstab File
## Format: dev_mount <label> <mount_point> <part> <sysfs_path1...>
## label - Label for the volume
## mount_point - Where the volume will be mounted
## part - Partition # (1 based), or 'auto' for first usable partition.
## <sysfs_path> - List of sysfs paths to source devices
Our task is to swap the mount_point of sdcard and extsd card.
17. For example in vold.fstab of Cyanbook v4, mount_point of "sdcard" is "/storage/sdcard1auto" and mount_point of "extsd" ie "External SD Card" is "/storage/sdcard0auto".
Change sdcard1auto to sdcard0auto and change sdcard0auto to sdcard1auto.
Similarly for stock ROM, change /mnt/extsd to /mnt/sdcard and vice versa.
18. Warning: Verify again, have you done it correctly because after saving this your partition will be swapped or your device will be bricked (if done in correctly).
19. Press back button, save the file.
20. Restart your Device.
21. After Reboot, Visit Settings, Storage and verify that the mount_point is swapped. Congratulations!!!
22. Hit Thanks if I Helped
--Regards
GautamMKGarg/gautam.garg

[TouchWiz] Mount ext4 formatted SD cards on TouchWiz ROMs

Hello everyone,
Background: Last January I wanted to mount an ext4 formated SD card, and it turned out to be a bit more difficult than just inserting it in my Note II. Back then, there was no exFAT support whatsoever in AOSP ROMs and I wanted to be able to run either TouchWiz or AOSP without having to reformat my card. FAT32 wasn't an option because of the 4GB limit.
I've since automated the methods that were devised in my previous thread (with due credit to @ttabbal), and since they should work on a variety of devices running TouchWiz ROMs, I thought it would be best to create a new thread in a more general location.
The usual caveats apply.
Required:
TouchWiz ROM
init.d support
a custom recovery that mounts ext4 SD cards properly, or a mounting updater-script. TWRP works out-of-the-box on my Note II.
You can get init.d support with the stock kernel on many devices by having the run-parts command launch from a custom install-recovery.sh script. See the following thread for files and a how-to:
[MOD]Term-init & Zip-init: Enable Init.d for Any Phones w/o Need of Custom Kernels!!!
SD card removal:
Should you need to remove the card it can be unmounted and safely removed from the storage settings as usual. Mounting it again requires either a reboot or manually executing the init.d script and then activating the card in the storage settings.
Technical considerations:
The mounting occurs early enough during the boot process that the media scanner and MTP services have no issues with this.
If your init.d support comes from the install-recovery.sh trick, CWM will prompt to delete the script before reboot. Don't.
If the mounting script doesn't run for some reason, or you try to activate the card before having mounted it manually, the phone will give an error and ask if you want to format the card. Don't.
Enjoy,
Darkshado

Hello Darkshado, and thanks for your thread.
I have an S4 i9505 and I actually have a AOSP based MIUI operating system.
I have an external 16GB MicroSD EXT4 formatted with standard linux command.
I've to say that it works great, and the operating system just auto-mount that ext4 SD by itself..
Now I'm starting migrating from that very good but a little obsolete AOSP MIUI to a much more recent Samsung based version, wich is very complete and affrodable.
But ... this MIUI do not auto-mount my ext4 formatted external-sd.
It's strange because other OS, and other recovery also, do completely support external-sd ext4 filesystem.
MIUI says, from the notification bar, that the sd is not formatted and asks me if I want to procede with formatting.
I've obviously refuse that.
Do you have any suggests?
This MIUI is obviously a custom OS, and it sports 3.4.63-AbyssS4-1.6.1F Kernel.
Since this new MIUI is TW based I've tryed to run your script but without results.. Is there some other way to permanently auto-mount my ext4 external SD?
Kind regards.

Darkshado said:
... it turned out to be a bit more difficult than just inserting it in my Note II.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I still find no way to auto-mount the ext4 sd to my Samsung based MIUI, and your scripts does not work on it ...
Can you or anybody help me?
Tnahk you in advance.
Kind regards.

How to solve the permission issue on MicroSD EXT4 filesystem?
I've find a way to partition and format MicroSD with EXT4 filesystem, and also to mount it properly under this MIUI, wich is a TW based environment. :laugh: :good:
Just to let you know, AOSP based MIUI is MicroSD EXT4 compatibile out-of-the-box.
Unfortunately, after mounting my ext4 MicroSD, I have permission issue (that I do not have on AOSP):
default chmod is 077, which means that files created by apps on the ext4 formatted SD card will only be readable by the same apps, unless you manually update permissions.
Do you have any suggestion to solve definitively this issue, different than change permission manually or in a batch mode?
I mean, I can not run a script (for batch update chmod) every time I just take a picture ...
My mounting script are:
Code:
#making sure adbd is on port 5555:
setprop service.adb.tcp.port 5555
adb kill-server
stop adbd
start adbd
#starting server in a way where proper private key is used:
HOME=/sdcard adb start-server
# connecting server to localhost
adb connect localhost
sleep 2
#actually mounting sdcard and re-running vold :
adb -s localhost:5555 shell su -c /system/xbin/msd2.sh
#if we don't kill server it will drain power like crazy:
adb kill-server
than
Code:
mount -t ext4 /dev/block/mmcblk1p1 /storage/extSdCard && sleep 5 && /system/bin/vold
Thank you in advance for your kind support.
Regards.

one change
Great, this work for me with one change.
In /etc/init.d/10mountext4sd the line:
Code:
/system/bin/sdcard1 "$REALMNT" 1023 1023 &
Does not work, unless we change it to
Code:
/system/bin/sdcard1 "$REALMNT" /storage/sdcard1 1023 1023 &
Now it works and mounts the sdcard to /storage/sdcard1 nad /stroage/extSdCard
Changed zip attached

Thanks for this.
There seem to be at least 2 problems on sgs4 kk
- the external sdcard is not seen by MTP
- it is no longer possible to encrypt the external sdcard.
I get to "SD card encryption has been enabled. Selected options. Full encryption. The above options will be applied", but it just reverts to the same screen when tapping on "apply".
Something similar happened with an exFat formatted card. It seems that Samsung is stuck with FAT32.. so disappointing.
Is there an alternative to FAT32 for encrypting external sdcards on Samsung devices?

wassname said:
Great, this work for me with one change.
In /etc/init.d/10mountext4sd the line:
Code:
/system/bin/sdcard1 "$REALMNT" 1023 1023 &
Does not work, unless we change it to
Code:
/system/bin/sdcard1 "$REALMNT" /storage/sdcard1 1023 1023 &
Now it works and mounts the sdcard to /storage/sdcard1 nad /stroage/extSdCard
Changed zip attached
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Great work. But there is one more problem with it. The card is mounted with no-exec permissions, which makes it impossible to install .apk files from the card. You have to copy them to internal and only then can you install the apk file.
Could you fix it and release as v3?

wassname said:
Great, this work for me with one change.
In /etc/init.d/10mountext4sd the line:
Code:
/system/bin/sdcard1 "$REALMNT" 1023 1023 &
Does not work, unless we change it to
Code:
/system/bin/sdcard1 "$REALMNT" /storage/sdcard1 1023 1023 &
Now it works and mounts the sdcard to /storage/sdcard1 nad /stroage/extSdCard
Changed zip attached
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Could you please update this? I've been trying to get TW support for ext4.
Thank you in advance!

Hi Guys !!
This script work yet ?
I buyed one sdcard 128G and format this on ext4
I have a Galaxy Note 4 - rooted.
Thank you.
wQuick

method to set 0123-4567 as mount point for removable sdcard

This is a very annoying issue but I have not found any thread about it.
I'm trying to upgrade my external/removable sdcard for an android 6 device.
The new sdcard gets mounted to /mnt/media_rw/XXXX-XXXX (i.e. not 0123-4567), so no app works as files can't be found.
The linux way (ln) wont work. Simply creating /mnt/media/0123-4567 causes bad bootloop on my device. This suggests that FolderMount app or Magisk modules such as fbind are a bad idea. selinux is enforcing.
It appears that Android assigns different mount points are to different sdcards and the first sdcard always gets 0123-4567. It that's right, Android probably stores sdcards' identifiers so as to know which mount point to use at boot time. So, deleting the identifiers database would probably mean that the next card inserted would get 0123-4567 as mount point.
I have looked at the data of com.android.externalstorage, but there is nothing there. I don't see other obvious candidate apps.
Where is this ext sdcard data stored?

I was wrong. Android sets mount points matching sdcard uuid
How to change vfat partition UUID?
How do I change the UUID of a vfat partition? For ext2 / ext3 / ext4, this is done with a simple: tune2fs -U <new-uuid> /dev/<partition> Is there a similar command for vfat partitions?
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