yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] anlog:
Until we have a bulletproof method of doing a FULL factory image restore, I can't see how anyone would risk trying to repartition. You will most likely brick your tablet.

To be honest, I'm really surprised at how much of a stink people are making about the internal storage issue. You can get 16GB Micro SD cards for $15 bucks now if you shop around, and 32GB are $30-$50 brand new. AT LEAST we can store files in the /data partition. Yes, it's an annoyance that you can't access it from your PC, but the Nook Tablet hasn't even been out a week. Give it time and I'm sure some workarounds will come up.

The next closest competitor to the Nook Tablet is the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus, which is already getting lackluster reviews. The 16GB model is $399 with no SD card. For $300 you can have the Nook Tablet WITH 48GB of memory (or 32GB if you're a stickler for the PC access thing).
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] anlog:
I apologize if my post above seems harsh, but it's ridiculous how many people are complaining about stupid annoyances that will most likely be solved very soon. In fact, many of the people complaining about the Nook Tablet DON'T EVEN OWN ONE (or are butthurt about purchasing a Kindle Fire and are trying to make themsevles feel better about their purchase).
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] roustabout:
I'm not interested in the NT as an impulse buy because I have an NC and NST with a known, working and bulletproof recovery method, running at 1.1 ghz. I am interested in the NT OS, because I think it will be being pushed down my throat sooner rather than later by BN. For the things I do regularly, I need a chunk of data that I control to live on the internal memory and be reachable by my computer.

Sorry, but that's just what I need - I didn't say 'and no one else should buy it' yet - but I have to say, the NC as a 135 dollar refurb, overclockable to 1.1 - 1.3 ghz, able to run cm7 off SD card or internal memory, working bluetooth, excellent recovery methods well-documented... You tell me what's a better value. :)

Personally, I can't believe how gingerly the folks working on the device are treating it so far. I haven't seen anyone even try to look at recovery on this yet, not even to tell us what it does and does not do.

For instance, I was suggesting some fdisk stuff yesterday, and making it clear that until you write the changes, no changes are made. But no one here stepped up and said "Roustabout, fdisk is reporting really strange stuff." There is no risk in using fdisk to query your partitions.

You could take a functioning, rooted NT, drop a few small files into /system and /data, and then do a "factory recover" - 8 failed boots, if that's what it is on this device, and then look at /system again.

If /system still had the extra files you'd dropped there, you'd know that recovery on the NT is weak and not to be trusted. If the entire filesystem had been erased and the files were gone, you'd know that it was a solid /system recovery. You would not risk bricking your NT with such a test.

When the Nook Color was originally hacked, the devs took it apart and removed the internal memory from the device to analyze elsewhere.

They risked their Nook Color to see what made it tick, and expected to be able to put it together again. But they knew there was a risk, and took it.

That's hacking. It never occurred to them that by default, BN was going to leave it booting from SD.

What I'm seeing way too much of around the NT is people babbling about using Facebook pages and spam attacks to get BN to unlock the bootloader and root the device for them.

That's not not hacking, that's embarrassing. Do I sound harsh? Perhaps someone will start a facebook petition about it <runs and hides from the Scary Facebook Petition Children.>
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] dang69:
Meanwhile in the background some of us are enjoying the hell out of this little device and gleefully snatching up the morsels people like Analog and Indirect give us.

My friends are too ugly for video chat anyway. This will serve for a while.
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] anlog:
No disrespect, but it appears you haven't been reading all of the threads here.

The Nook Color is slow. PAINFULLY slow. Once you've used a Nook Tablet (or any other recent tablet), you won't be able to go back to a Nook Color. For me, even overclocked to 1.2 or 1.3, the Nook Color is way too slow to use. For others, it's usable. If I am presented the option to save $50-$100 to get a slower version of a device, I won't bite. That's why I spent the extra $50 to get a Nook Tablet. The speed increase alone is WELL worth the $50, if not way more. Most agree.

No one is going to blindly destroy their device or rip it apart and desolder memory chips less than week after it was released. You know that hacking is a slow and meticulous process, not a guns blazing get-er-done kind of thing. People ARE cautiously tinkering and exploring to get a good idea of what's under the hood. We have a TON of information and have made a TON of progress, all within a couple of days of release. You need to be patient. Perhaps the Nook Tablet isn't the right device for you?

There ARE people testing fdisk and reporting the results. It appears to be a non-standard partitioning scheme, and people ARE still tinkering.

It's silly that people are already freaking out about the next firmware update, when the device has been out less than one week. RELAX. It's not worth it to stress about an update that has yet to manifest (it will most likely be MONTHS before we see the first update).

There is a full factory restore after 8 failed boots. Earlier conflicting reports were wrong...

If you want things to move at a faster pace, my suggestion to you would be to purchase several (5-10) Nook Tablets and donate them to various developers to take apart and desolder memory chips.

The only other option is

patience and respect

for the work we are doing here.
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] insanemongol:
Tru Dat

;) True and Wise Words
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] FloridaPhil:
You bet! I LOVE this little tablet and I havent even bothered to root it yet - I just slapped Go Launcher on it and sideloaded my apps. Thanks to the devs here Im learning something new every day.

App2sd shows I have 11.88gb available.
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] snailmale:
I'm really thankful and appreciative for those who have contributed to the development of the Nook Tablet. Without them, I wouldn't even consider purchasing the NT. (And the NT is the only tablet I would consider given the current alternatives)

But that being said, I understand roustabout's frustrations. Having come from phones with very active developing communities, the rate at which the NT is being explored seems very slow. Somehow it feels like there are very few people who have the NT in their hands, and even fewer who know anything beyond flashing an update.zip in CWM, which results in a slow rate of expansion of our NT knowledge base. (I myself know almost nothing as well, so I'm not saying there's anything wrong with not being programming-savvy)

My main hope is that more developers, especially experienced ones, will come in, and not be put off by the locked bootloader. I'm still eagerly checking the forums each day, and hope to see more action!
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] Indirect:
I don't have a device right now, I'll be getting my nook tab by friday or saturday then I'm gonna spend all weekend poking around in it and learning how to -properly- mount and whatever else I need to do to toy with it at will.
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] Mangala_Dharma:
Hello , I don't own the NT, so I can't try to get the ext4 partition to work on windows, but I googled something like " windows drivers ext-4 usb sd " and got a link for a project, www.ext2fsd.com/ . O dont know if this is the precise solution, needs researching on windows and drivers. Also Windows would have to mount and recognize the ext4 partition, I don't know scripting but that might be an avenue worth pursuing instead of resizing and formating partitions. I'll look into it for my phone's ext-4 and fat32 partitions.

Ok, good luck all
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] DeanGibson:
Why should they spend a penny, when the developers here won't immediately do their bidding?

I don't think you need to apologize. The entitlement attitude here is why there are so many countries around the world in financial distress.
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] roustabout:
@anlog: you're right, I haven't been able to read all the posts in all the threads here.

However, no one else has either, or they'd already have told me 'yo, dude, fdisk is blown now. the step by step you posted? sure, you were trying to help out, but it doesn't matter.'

I mean, you could have mentioned early on and saved me some typing :)

I had not seen that the recovery is hosed.

That's really too bad. Unless fastboot and/or the OMAP equivalent of nvflash is viable on the tablet, there's no reason for me to recommend it to anyone; if they are viable, it's just one device amongst many that are worth looking at for someone technical.

It means lots of us will be very, very cautious about updating to 1.4, since I suspect that 1.4 on the NC will roll in many of the changes we're already seeing on the tablet, possibly including borking the recovery partition and worse case locking some folks out of their CM7 cards for a few days or weeks.

BTW, the mention about hacking was not directed to you personally - you're actually putting in the effort, as are others - but to people who aren't doing so and were basically taking it as a God given right that every device BN produces will forever be using the same boot code and style. So when, a week after release, there are folks setting up petitions to demand changes from the vendor because there are problems that aren't solved yet, it puts my teeth on edge.

You are not one of those people, and I get that.

There are use cases for the NC and NT and NST where it's very, very helpful to have real access to internal storage. Especially on the NST, but also on an NC with any amount of data allocated to BN > 1G, you can manage your entire library with Calibre rather than some with BN's software and some with Calibre - but that requires symlinking from a fat to an ext partition and it works a lot better if you can also resize that fat partition, since otherwise everything from BN winds up on that small partition that your computer can see. Obviously this will be true if the partitioning issue isn't resolved on the NST, as well.

I don't think the symlink can even be done between different EMMCs (microSD and internal), and if it could, you'd still run into weird things going on when you swapped cards.
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] Indirect:
Im petitioning for them to unlock it or provide a method to unlock it but im also just trying every resource to get what we all want.

Sent by breaking the sound barrier
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] anlog:
I think I came close, but vold (or whatever is used to mount in Windows) is picky. I created an image with dd and stored it in /data, created /dev/loop0 device with mknod, mounted the loop and formatted as vfat, and bind mounted the looped image off /mnt/media. It all worked, but the /mnt/media partition just wouldn't mount in windows with that link in place.

It's a shame, since it would have been a viable workaround...
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] romified:
There are two different restores on the NT. One just does /data, but if it still can't reboot then it will restore it like the day you bought it, you will have to register it all over again and all. Trust me, it will restore /system. After what I have tried and recovered from, this puppy has a very healthy restore process. I have killed it so many times and just let it do a full recovery to start all over, root again and go at it some more.
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] anlog:
There seems to be conflicting views about this. Do you know of a surefire way to instigate the full restore (not just /data)? Any restore will require re-registration.

Someone accidentally removed their keyboard apk and basically farked their tablet, since they couldn't enter any text to register it. They tried every key combination to do a full factory restore, with no luck.

Everything I've seen up to this point shows that root (or anything installed to /system) will remain after a restore. You're certain that after the full restore every custom item placed into /system goes away? If so, then that means the factory restore files ARE on the device (Indirect found a 60MB-ish file that looked like a restore file).
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] roustabout:
If you can get a Nook Color to fail to boot 8 times, a process is triggered from partition 3, where a hidden recovery lives, that initiates a full format of /system followed by a copy in, permission setting and symlinking of everything system needs.

Erase and deregister only deletes /data, not /system.

This stuff is pretty well known for the NC - this is why I'm surprised that so far it seems that NT folks aren't trying to initiate these failure modes manually (rather than by screwing around until they need them)

To see if you can initiate this manually, on a rooted device, try this:

adb shell

echo -n -e "\x08\x00\x00\x00" > /rom/devconf/BootCnt

reboot

Also, it's really worth it to get up to speed on

http://nookdevs.com/ as there are a lot of tricks that may work documented there.

The complete guide to restoring to stock for the NC is here:

http://nookdevs.com/Flash_back_to_clean_stock_ROM

It sounds to me as if the question of solid recovery has yet to be as fully investigated as I had thought earlier today.
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] romified:
The initial restore that kicks in, the same one you can get to by holding down the n key on power up, only does data for sure. But if you continue to not sucessfully boot up it will go into a data restore without even asking, and a factory software restore follows that. I know 100% for sure it wipes and restores system because I added a ton of libs and binaries from a sense ROM and they were gone after the restore. Besides I had /system so borked at one point it had to restore it or I would have had a brick on my hands. I've messed with so many files, its pretty resilient on factory restoration.

I have become so familiar with both restores I know how to force one or the other now.

I have seen this mentioned another time in a post on here somewhere, probably the development or root post.

A dev now has cwm partially working, so progress is being made.
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] anlog:
Good to know! I stand corrected!

I've been waiting for CWM so I could make a decent and easily restorable backup of the NT. Looking forward to seeing some nice update.zip files...
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] theundeadelvis:
Yeah, i totally jacked up some system files, had no keyboard, and numerous fc's. Did the failed boot method, although it took ten times and not eight, and restored back to new.
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] bigdessert:
What about simply root ftp server?
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] xdajunkman:
I have no idea if this is helpful....but I installed NookColorTools on my NT just to see if it worked. For the most part it did....but tapping on one of the settings items triggered a full factory reset just like the 8 failed boots. There are 5 entries for com.android.settings in the list. Selecting the third item causes some kind of permissions error that triggers a reboot and factory reset. Again...dont know if this helps but thought I would throw it out there.
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] roustabout:
This is really good news for those of us who would rather not have to have hands on a device to help fix it.

Great to hear Clockwork is moving also.

The NC was sold as supporting landscape but didn't. There are older folks for whom holding the device upright is painful -- I've actually dropped a couple of CWR cards in the mail with the manual nooter on 'em and walked people through the rooting on the phone. (And fixed one a few months later that developed a Flash bootloop.)

I'm hopeful that we may again have a device we can be that confident in working on. Unless the partitioning can be worked out I'll probably move off the platform, but to me that recover and the difficulty in doing a real brick is a lot of the value of the Nook gear. I mostly use it as a reading platform for RSS and epub, when I'm not using it as a very safe learning environment.
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] romified:
I will have to decompile the apk and have a look. Maybe we can modify it for the NT. I have been using it as well to access full settings menus.

Also for reference, it looks like BootCnt is now under /bootdata/BootCnt
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] roustabout:
I just realized something last night. For the NC, I wrote a flashable script that symlinks /data/media/B&N Downloads to /media/B&N Downloads, so that on a setup which has been partitioned with more than 1G assigned to BN, you can still manage your books and magazines with Calibre:

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1273860

That script is based on the repartitioning of the NST, which I started on from Linux while booted from Noogie - it took me a while to start wanting to see how much of this could be done with the ADB shell, since I was hoping for things that could be packaged into flashable files without risking folks getting commands mucked up.

Someone in the NST thread asked a great question: If you can do an

ln -s /media/B&N Downloads /data/media/B&N Downloads

how about trying an

ln -s /sdcard/B&N Downloads /data/media/B&N Downloads?

I'm still very early on in looking at that but at least on the NST and NC, file linking to placeholders in /data does work from /sdcard as well as from /media.

If this is also true on the NT, then it resolves one problem with the NT, being able to manage an entire library with a single interface, Calibre, and not being limited to doing so on the 1G of space that BN leaves open for sideloading.

I would consider it a favor if anyone has time to look at whether that kind of symlink is possible.

On the issue of blocking OTA updates: I've been blocking OTA updates on the NC by downloading the sideload files and looking at the install scripts. It's fairly obvious which values in build.prop the installation scripts use to trigger updating, and modifying built.prop so that it has those values also blocks the update, and - better yet - on first boot after installation, even pops up the little OS indicator that says you've updated.

I do not know that this technique will work when the inevitable 1.4.1 update rolls out, but I expect that it will, and it's certainly worth looking at once the update is available.

If it does, copying in the new build.prop file from a Clockwork script or manually is very simple to do, and could probably also be done from a batch file.

But I'm really glad to see progress on Clockwork as that is - in my experience - the simplest, least error prone way of delivering useful updates to folks who don't know symlink from Linksys.
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] sonicdh:
Okay, I'm a windows guy, so let me just see if I'm following along here:

We can make a symbolic link from the \media\ to \data\, but that link fails when we connect via usb and \media\ is unmounted to allow access via USB.

And re-partitioning is risky because we aren't 100% sure if we have a solid restore to fall back on just in case **** gets borked.

Quite a quandary.
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] CRE:
Why not just root a store demo and just shrink the /data partition by 500MB? Minimally intrusive so it's not likely to brick the device even if the factory restore doesn't work and then you'll have your answer. Or does this have to done with a PC attached?
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] sonicdh:
I'm fairly sure you need a pc to root the NT. That's how i rooted mine.
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] rjmohit:
Does anyone even know how to shrink the partitions? Coz I am ready to try it out on my device, but dunno how to!! :confused:
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] DeanGibson:
Ethics

Huh? How do you suggest anyone "just root a store demo and shrink the /data partition by 500MB"???

Aside from the ethics of doing that to a store demo, as the person who created the repartitioning scripts for the Nook Color, I don't know how to do that on the Nook Tablet (which uses a partitioning scheme that FDISK doesn't recognize).

And it's not "minimally intrusive".

And you're happy to leave the store with the store demo unable to do a factory restore?? Agreed, that's unlikely, but that's OK with you if it happens???
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] DagobahSamurai:
Why bother repartitioning? I thought it was stated earlier in this thread that simply rooting the device will give you access to the B&N partition.
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] sonicdh:
The thing is that you have to modify the permissions for the folder or else you cant write to it. And even then, some apps have trouble interacting with it. Repartitioning the FS so that the user folder is bigger just works out easier.
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] rjmohit:
This is ridiculous! Everyone's talking about why or why not to repartition, but does ANYBODY even know how to do it?! It's like listing out the pros and cons of being a superhero when no one even knows how to become one!!

Instead of doing all this, can't we just concentrate on finding out ways to to repartition it?
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] Indirect:
I rooted a store demo, I did it becausei was bored and didn't have a book tablet about two days after I released the method...

Sent by breaking the sound barrier
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] gtaber:
That's a good idea, wait for CWM. But for now, I'm just pointing apps like backups and downloads, and anything else that I don't want to put on my SD to a dir. I made under /data. Can also copy from Windows via usb to SD, then copy to /data with a file manager-have put 3gig or so of stuff in it so far, and all the apps. I'm thrilled to have that much space for apps too. I guess no real need to use apps2sd either, with 11gig to start with after system stuff.

---------- Post added at 09:42 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:34 AM ----------

I agree with you....I consider it awesome to have 11gig of app storage, and if you can't copy files around with a file manager, then maybe you shouldn't be rooting your device to begin with.........:D
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] frexe:
Thanks! I only have a gig sd as of now and this method works great. Now I can hold off on the 32gb sd.
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] kenblat:
just wanna share you guys the methods (Permanence method) that all non-root apps (such as jjcomics...) can access to NT internal storage

1. root

2. using Root Explorer go to /data create folder named usrdata (or using adb and run this command mkdir /data/usrdata)

3. copy the attached file, override the existing file (/system/bin/clrbootcount.sh) (*)

4. reboot. From now on, you can access your internal storage as /mnt/internal using any apps without ROOT access.

(*) pls rename the old file as clrbootcount.sh.bk before copy the attached file as above (and pls note that VERY IMPORTANT: change the File Permission using Root Explorer same as the old file too) or you can manual add these line at the end of your current clrbootcount.sh

mount -o remount,rw -t rootfs rootfs /

mkdir /mnt/internal

busybox mount -o bind /data/usrdata /mnt/internal

chmod 777 /mnt/internal

chmod 777 /data/usrdata

mount -o remount,ro -t rootfs rootfs /

Credit: http://xdaforums.com/showpost.php?p=19713966&postcount=1
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] sonicdh:
Brilliant. ****ing well done! Now if only we could get it to mount via USB instead of the "My Nook" folder.
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] rvr350:
Anyway to spoof app like PowerAmp to take the /mnt/internal? Because right now folders that start with /mnt/media or /mnt/sdcard are accepted.

Thanks
[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] ron1n541:
try symlinking it

---------- Post added at 12:08 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:05 AM ----------

Couldn't we just ADB push a directory over wifi to /data on the NT? I mean, we have root. It seems like a much better solution than sideloading and copying from the sd.