Formatting sdcards made easy.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009
For those who don't know how to format their sdcards to perform apps2sd its really really really simple.. but the tools are somewhat confusing to some. so im just going to go the easy way, some will say find Paragon partition manager "illegally" , but im going to say scratch that.

The easiest way to go is to download ubuntu, its simple easy to use, and you don't have to install anything at all. the only knowledge you need to have is how to burn an iso image, which isn't hard at all. but if you don't just click here. Now with that said, Lets download ubuntu here. once that's done make the cd, then back up everything on your sdcard, put it where you wont forget where its at. (its easy to do that sometimes) anyways, once you've backed up your files, reboot your computer and boot from cd, some computers promt to boot from cd, sometimes you have to hit f12 or some other type of key combination, besure to do that, now when booting you'll see a bunch of text, just let it work its self, soon it will ask you the language, default is english , then it will ask if you want to try ubuntu, press enter, once its booted up, you will want to connect your phone and mount the sdcard, you should see it show up on the desktop

Almost there!, ok back to the guide, now what you'll want to do is on the top of the screen click system>administration>partition editor , the first drive you will see is your HD:



There is a drop down menu on the right and it should show 2 devices, if more, you have other memory units connected. but i only have 2, so /dev/sdb is my sdcard, so select that one, now what you will see is a unmodified sdcard hopefully:


(if yours is partitoned... why are you reading this.)

Now what you will want to do is click on the lower window's text that says /dev/sdb1 and select unmount (/dev/sdb1 what this means is device/name1 / 1 being the first partition and the keys means its mounted and we cant do anything to it -- in the formatting sense, so right click it and unmount it)



After that, delete the partition



This will format the card, and give it all that free space back, next right click on it and click new, it will give you a window like:



Now your sizes will be different than mine but all you need to do is select fat32 (this is where the camera stores all the pictures,music,downloads from the phone, what you see on a mounted sdcard in windows), and put 500 for the begining of the partition (this will be where the apps2sd goes 500mbs is good but you can change it up to what ever you want, but in my opinion anything over 500 is overkill) so go ahead and click add

Now you'll have a nice large partition for your info on the sdcard, and a small unallocated partition in the front, go ahead and click new on that the unallocated spot, and this time just change the format to ext2 or ext3 then click add (most roms use ext2, but are starting to use ext3 so check the rom's type before selecting ext3)



after thats done, click apply it should take just a short time, and ofcourse you'll know when you're finished.



now its safe to reboot and take the cd out. now congratulate yourself on formatting your sdcard. on the post about flashing theres a link to the apps2sd's app, or you can get it from the market, you'll want to copy existing files over - and well it guides you ... also when ever you're flashing to a newer rom you'll want to format that ext2/ext3 clean before flashing. your apps and system info might still be on the ext2/ext3 side and could cause a boot loop. any other questions just comment and ill get back too it when i can.

1 comments:

Unknown said...

Tried Ubuntu months ago, couldn't get it working... this makes me wanna try it again.
(btw, I just use the console in Cyanogen's recovery flasher)