I have a miscellaneous brand phone with root access. Its system comes with lots of junk apps pre-installed, so I unpacked the system image and deleted them. As a result, the system partition which was originally 2GB now only uses 1GB. I then used the parted tool to shrink the system partition and enlarge the userdata partition. However, when I tried to flash the system partition with the "fastboot flash" command, it still required 2GB of space and showed "sparse image size span overflow" error. Is there any way to pack the system partition while reducing its actual occupied size, or force flash the system image?
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On a 32GB Verizon version GS3, when I go to settings > storage, under miscellaneous files, it show "system memory" to be 5.74GB, I looked at an unrooted 16GB version, and system memory was only 3.49GB, of my total 5.8GB miscellaneous files, about 60mb is other files and applications, and the remainder says "5.74GB system memory".
Why is it so much higher on a 32GB vs. 16GB? I mean the system files should not be proportional to internal storage space, right? I don't have a lot of apps, and I have in fact removed a bunch of original system apps, it tells me I have only about 300 mb of /system space available, how is this possible?
I have flashed rooted images from Odin a couple of times, restored NAND about 20 times or more, and rooted via adb once or twice from stock unrooted. Is all this fragmenting the /system partition? Should I format /system next time I'm in recovery? If so, my pc doesn't seem to recognize the phone in recovery when connected. Do I need different drivers to connect while in recovery, so I can mount and format /system? I can format /data and /cache easily in recovery, and when I had my old HTC Evo 4G, I could connect the phone while in cwm and format /system, but I can't on an SGS3. Is there another easy way to format /system before restoring a NAND backup to truly start from scratch on a clean system partition?
Thank you
Hi,
before I brick my smartphone: is the internal storage a real GPT partitioned thing which can be changed by gdisk, parted and friends? I'll change only the things starting with cache - and only sizes & partitions, not the overall layout. I would like to squeeze the unused cache-partition to a few MBs and reduce the cdrom-partition, move the system-partition at top and increase the userdata partition.
Best regards,
mifritscher
Any infos on this one? Could I recover from a completely broken flash via fastboot, qdload or sdboot?
Ok, I tried - and failed *g*
I partitioned with parted - and the kernel accepted the new partition table as well. But it seems that the phone either blocks write access to the GPT, or has its own internal version. Because after a reboot, I got the old partition table again.
Luckily I had a backup (with I needed for repartitioning anyway), and both fastboot and recovery worked. TWRP was only a bit refused regarding the broken partitions, but it could both reformat the partition and fire the backup (with I did with dd and gzip) before).
So the big question is: How can I unlock the emmc to write to the GPT?
I am in the process of putting together a ROM based on a Mediatek device and the scatter file I have lists the userdata partition with a size of only 1.3 GB or so. It is the last partition that is downloaded onto the device (the flashinfo and sgpt partitions come after that but are not set to be downloaded as they have the is_download: false entry). Hence, this partition is expected to extend to the full available space on the device (userdata is set to be located at around 3 GB and the total size of the device is 12 GB, so it can be extended much further)
Now I was wondering in what part of the installation process the userdata partition gets extended to take up the remainder of the space of the EMMC. Does this happen during the first run? Or does it need a separate factory reset? Anyone with some expert knowledge care to explain?
Is there any way to prepare a Gapps like package with additional apps of choice (any app i want to be installed) and install them after ROM into system partition?
If i install a debloated Gapps i end up with 3/4 of unused system partition which will not be used in the future-it is a space wasted. resizing partitons is dangerous if i have to use backups. If it would be possible to install apps of choice into the system partition then i could use up system partition space and use userdata space for other stuff. Of course app updates of apps installed into system partition should be installed/stored in system partition too.
Thank you
Personally never would abuse /system partition to store user-apps there.
xXx yYy said:
Personally never would abuse /system partition to store user-apps there.
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Click to collapse
Why if 3/4 of space is unused? Could you let me know if you are familiar with dangers of it? thanks
Never encountered or heard of that 3/4 of storage space under /system is unused. My experince is that only some 100KB are free for further use ( updates ).
xXx yYy said:
Never encountered or heard of that 3/4 of storage space under /system is unused. My experince is that only some 100KB are free for further use ( updates ).
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Isnt this system space on the screenshot system partition? Let me know if i am wrong. thank you
If phone's Android is rooted and its /system partition is mounted as RW then apply the du command in Android's terminal to get the disk space memory utilized by files in /system partition.
To get the unused disk space memory in /system apply the df command.
I have 16GB phone and wanted to do a full backup but it's size is 11768MB which I think should be more, look at the calculation:
it's 16GB phone (in decimal) which in binary is 14.9GB. (16000/1074) so main internal storage in digital computation is 14.9GB.
my system partition+data partition (shown in TWRP backup) are 11768MB. (9500 /data and rest is /system)
my internal storage: 868MB free + 1.36GB used (=2228MB)
all other partitions are 167MB (excluding data and system and sdcard)
so far it's 11768+2228+167=14,163MB
but my whole internal storage is 14,900MB and now whole things on my phone is 14,163MB, so where is that 737MB?
also apps cache and system cache are almost nothing and dalvik cache is 629MB (which I think is included in TWRP's /data calculation)
do you have any idea of missing 737MB? does TWRP exclude anything or am I wrong?
TWRP saves only those partitions that may change due to flashing custom ROM.
An example is the vendor partition.
ze7zez said:
TWRP saves only those partitions that may change due to flashing custom ROM.
An example is the vendor partition.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
yes I know and I calculated whole partitions and SDCARD and TWRP system and data and free storage and everything but the size isn't same as device internal storage space (you can look at my calculation above)
If you want you can always save a disk and not the partitions.
You won't be able to flash it with fastboot (I don't think), but if you have EDL or its equivalent you can.
Renate said:
If you want you can always save a disk and not the partitions.
You won't be able to flash it with fastboot (I don't think), but if you have EDL or its equivalent you can.
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Click to collapse
it's not about backing up, it's mostly because of my curiosity that why when I have root and calculated whole stuff (partitions) plus cache plus free space, altogether they don't fit my internal disk space (14.9GB) and are 737MB less!!! can you test it on your phone and see what will be the result.
I really have no idea what we are discussing.
Code:
Poke3:/ # dd if=/dev/block/mmcblk0 of=/dev/null
61071360+0 records in
61071360+0 records out
31268536320 bytes (29 G) copied, 209.698476 s, 142 M/s
I don't use TWRP.