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Jul

14

2011

TalkAndroid Guide: Partitioning your Evo’s SD Card to Take Advantage of GingerSense ROMs

by Andrew Greenfield
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Gingerbread based Sense ROMs are currently all the rage right now on the Evo 4G. In an attempt to help a lot of newbies save some heart attacks, I’m posting a a quick (but fool proof) guide on how to partition your SD card. Yes, I’ll hold your hand through this.

So why do this? If you’ve installed a GingerSense ROM without partitioning your SD card you might have noticed the abnormally small amount of internal storage your phone had. This will cure that.

If you have absolutely NO idea what you are doing, please read everything first. It’ll make your life much easier and prevent you from being surprised.

And remember, as with all rooting guides we have to issue this warning because there’s always someone who decides not to read all the instructions: TA is not responsible if this bricks your phone, does something crazy, or causes your phone to slap your baby bunny. With that out of the way, let’s get on to the good stuff.

WARNING: This will wipe everything on your SD card clean. Your pictures, your music, your game files, EVERYTHING. So what to do? DO A BARREL ROLL. Or start reading. Remember, I told you I’d hold your hand.

  1. Connect your phone to your computer and transfer EVERYTHING that you want to keep/use after this process to your computer. Again, EVERYTHING WILL BE WIPED.
  2. Reread step 1. If someone claims they missed step 1 I will officially not feel bad.
  3. Reread step 2. Twice.
  4. Download the ROM you’re looking to flash. If you want to do this with a Gingerbread/Sense ROM and don’t know where to start let me recommend Synergy. Place this on your desktop or anywhere you can easily find it.
  5. Get amonRA recovery, version 2.3. This part I will leave you to your own. If you are not aware of how to get a different recovery this is something you should learn. And the reason amonRA is the designated recovery is because I’m using it (so I can give EXACT instructions) and because it is generally considered “safer” than CWM (but that is for another day).
  6. Select “Partition SD Card.” You will be prompted for three values.
  7. For SWAP size, enter 0.
  8. For ext2 you have your choice between 1024 (what I used) and 2048. The rest will be designated for FAT.
  9. After all this has completed, select “Upgrade ext2 to ext3.”
  10. Now, we wipe. Wipe everything. Data, cache, sdext, everything.
  11. Go to the main menu and selcect USB-MS so you can copy the file that you downloaded in 4 to the root of your SD card (aka not in any folders)
  12. Flash Synergy. Realize that the boot will take A LONG time. Set your phone down and watch a show, get some food, whatever, It is not uncommon for this process to take 30 minutes. You’ll only worry yourself if you just stare at waiting for it to boot.
    If your phone loads the lockscreen and then goes back into the boot animation you did not wipe everything. This is a common mistake. Heck, I made this mistake my first time. It is not a big deal. Wipe all your good stuff. Reflash the ROM. That’s all you should have to do.
  13. You’re done! Your phone has been partitioned!

This will be updated when we get some custom kernels since the stock HTC kernel has some problems with SWAP (it does not support it). If you have no idea what that means then you have nothing to worry about. If you do, add some memory to your SWAP partition to ready it for the future.

A similar walk through can be found on xda if you’re more comfortable discussing it there.

» See more articles by Andrew Greenfield

Comments

  • Jason Quinn

    Wow! Coolest ever….. I love the Synergy ROM, but my only beef with it was it using so much space on the internal storage. After this partition, I now have 368mb on the Evo 4G!!

  • http://cell-phone-store.net/ maghunter

    What does rooting allow you to do with an EVO that is better than stock? I dont know anyone with a rooted phone so I cant see one in operation.

    • Dotnettex

      Rooting gives you super user permissions to your device. This basically allows you to do anything, even brick your phone. I rooted mine so I can strip off all the garbage my cell provider put on it. I also wanted to option to install a custom recovery tool (such as ClockworkMOD). This allows the backup and restore of your phones ROM, as well as the ability to install a custom ROM for your phone. If your a power user, and hate not having control over a device you own, then rooting is the path to heaven!

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