[Galaxy Note 8.0 (Tablet) General] roustabout:
So, the Note 8.0 is a nice, fast, expensive device that had a big shortcoming for me: as shipped, the SD card is not useful as a place where application data easily lands - it's only intended for storing music and video files, or those chunks of data you manually target to it.

I fixed it, after a fashion, by mounting the card at boot time as sdcard0, which Samsung normally assigns to the (very limited) internal storage. The internal /data/media pool is treated as the external sdcard and very little installation data defaults to it. Apps2SD is still broken, but quite a lot of things simply default to using /sdcard0 as their preferred storage, which I find helpful.

You have to mount it at start time (init.d), and you have to mount it correctly (bind)

I figured out and set my device up this way by setting init.d scripts I learned about from threads by Ryuinferno (init.d) and mattiadj (rebinding in the Note 2) for this. Translation: none of this is my work, I just sounded out how others had done it and am assembling it here, since I know it will help other Note 8 folks.

I think that the init.d script support is very interesting - there are a lot of ROM tweaks that rely on init.d. You do not need a custom kernel for init.d to work the note 8 - which is nice, since we have no custom kernel :)

The outcome of this mod is that with an sdcard inserted, I get:

/storage/sdcard0 29.7G 3.68G 26.0G 32768

and

/storage/extSdCard 9.87G 1.78G 8.09G 4096

If I remove the card at boot, I still have apps (installed at /data/data) and the media

pool reverts to normal:

/storage/sdcard0 9.78G 1.78G 7.99G 4096

I wrote none of the scripts I'm using and will be the first to admit that I may have set them up stupidly.

Doing this voids your warranty and gives you pimples and a moon tan. But it does mean your sd card expands your storage and I hope that if there are better ways to do any of this, folks will chime in.

tools needed:

- knowledge of ADB and working ADB

- helps if you know how Unix and windows terminate lines differently, and can get your copy of Notepad++ to help you with the script, if you're trying this from Windows

- a note 8 running the 4.1.2 software - this approach is only tested there

- Kies

- Possibly Odin as a replacement for Kies (untested)

- understanding of how to put your device into recovery mode and trigger the Samsung recovery

- the US stock firmware for your device, for use with Odin (unless waiting on 1+ gig downloads if you screw something up is ok by you - the Kies method works, slooooowly.)

- Framaroot, to root your Note 8 (see the thread by tweebee)

- Busybox installed

Steps:

Install Framaroot

Root your device

Install busybox

Easy part done.

Next, you need to be able to run init.d scripts. At first I thought this might require a custom kernel, until I ran into Ryuinferno's excellent tool for enabling init.d without a custom kernel.

the thread I learned this from is by Ryuinferno at http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1933849

I used term-init.sh from an ADB command line, but the thread has an APK in it called Uni-Init.apk that I would expect to work.

What you're doing is creating an install-recovery.sh script and telling it to go read /etc/init.d and run scripts there at boot.

Next, you want to create a simple script and drop it into /etc/init.d You can do this with an adb push; if you create the file in windows, though, you need to deal with the line endings correctly. You need the script to be executable and to be owned by root.

The one I'm using is this, from Mattiadj of the Note 2 community

in this thread: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=2036796:

I call the script 07mount on my device, and a copy is attached to this post.

-----------------------script starts next line

#!/system/bin/sh

#extsd2internalsd is a modification that allows to switch internal sd to external sd

#and viceversa. With this you can use default internal sd only for app storage

#and the external sd to store all apps resource and all others stuff. The resut is a very

#big increase of installable apps on gnote2 and note8

#All credits to Mattiadj of xda forum for the idea and script and to mike1986 for

#the cmw zip. xda thread url

# at http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=2036796:

sleep 10

mount -o remount,rw /

mount -t vfat -o umask=0000 /dev/block/vold/179:17 /storage/sdcard0

sleep 30

mount -o bind /data/media /storage/extSdCard

chmod 777 /mnt/extSdCard

sleep 10

chown 1023:1023 /storage/extSdCard

chown 1000:1000 /storage/sdcard0

------------- end script on blank line above

You need /system remounted read/write, either in your favorite file explorer or via adb shell:

#mount -o rw,remount /system

to put the file in and

#chown root:root

the script itself

Now, put a fat32 formatted card into your sdcard, and reboot. When done, you should be able to see that your data storage has been remapped.

If you ever wanted to install a Samsung update, by the way, you'd need to completely unroot the device. I think the following would probably work:

- remove the su binary

- remove superuser from /system

- remove the busybox binaries

- remove install-recovery.sh from /etc and the /etc/init.d folder

If there was someting in an update you really wanted, you might do better to start by using the Samsung firmware downloaded from samfirmware.com, set your device all the way back to a clean install, then check for the OTA - Samsung does look at modifications and blocks updates to devices with changes to /system. My device is ineligible for OTA at this time.

That said, it appears that using Kies in emergency recovery mode can be used to reset your device to an as-shipped condition (I learned this when an early experiment resulted in my device being weirdly screwed up - bootable, but the network was down for the browser, etc. DNS and ping worked from an ADB prompt, though...)

You can download a copy of the script at http://www.mediafire.com/?2wbm439vlapb6om