[Verizon Samsung Galaxy S 4] MetaMav:
**UPDATE, Working MOD!**

Mattiadj has a working mod to make your S4's external sd card your internal storage while making your internal just a place for extra resources!

This is HUGE and it is working very well for me. This mod is not a "complete swap" where the two mounting points are just switched but it accomplishes the same goal! There are a few things you will have to get use to once you install this but nothing that can't be overlooked. Here a link to his thread: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=2468596. I suggest everyone try this out and give him any helpful feedback.

For now, Mattiadj's mod is the closest thing to swapping your storage and will may be the closest we ever get on 4.2.2 (it works great). With Android 4.3 officially coming to our devices soon their may be more possibilities for a "complete swap" on 4.3. Until then, I suggest everyone use mattiadj's mod. Thanks mattiadj!

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Hello S4 owners!

I know I'm not the only S4 user wanting more internal storage on their phone whether it be "16 GB" or "32GB". I've been doing a lot of research into swapping internal with external storage to use the micro sd card as device storage (e.g. 64GB sd card to replace 16GB internal storage vice-versa). I've done this technique on a previous device (http://xdaforums.com/showpost.php?p=43024409) by modifying the vold.fstab file to swap storage mounting points. Since samsung released 4.2.2 on their devices the vold.fstab has been modified without anyone being able to figure out how to swap mounting points. The verizon release of android 4.3 may make modifying the vold.fstab more feasible but we will just have to wait and see.

For now, here are several routes I have looked into:

Modifying vold.fstab: There may be more code we can add but the current file only contains the mounting location for external storage and not internal storage. This makes it seemingly impossible to just swap lines of code. Someone trying to overcome the same road block: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=2168489.

Modifying storage_list.xml within framework-res.apk: I have looked into how android mounts storage devices and it seems that 4.2.2 and earlier rely on the vold.fstab and storage_list.xml (http://source.android.com/devices/tech/storage/). I then began trying to look into the storage_list.xml located in the framework-res.apk and found these:

http://xdaforums.com/showpost.php?p=27432510

http://xdaforums.com/showpost.php?p=35792201

I tried modifying the storage_list.xml but when I swapped the "sdcard0" and "extSdCard" text in the file (after unpacking adn repacking the apk) my phone went into a bootloop. I understand that swapping two phrases in a file didn't have much evidence to support trying it but I had to find out what it did. Maybe someone can help with this. This example of a storage_list.xml file provided by google (https://android.googlesource.com/de...eworks/base/core/res/res/xml/storage_list.xml) looks much different from the extracted file I pulled which had a lot of random characters and null signs (using notepad++).

Using init.d script: I have found two people who have tried this for the S4:

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=2363670 This mod results in a lack of access to the internal device storage. (According to the posts)

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1772234 This mod results in a successful swap (according to some posts) but is unstable and causes a lot of application crashes and glitches. The OP needs more testers, but the thread is still fairly active and

could be a possible route

. I have yet to test this.

I understand that there are applications such as forldermount and link2sd that provide options for freeing up internal memory but these options do not provide enough storage for me personally (and others I'm sure). ME7 gave us app2sd ability but that still doesn't relieve enough space. My goal here is to start more discussion to address this issue.

Any ideas or comments

on the feasibility for swapping storage mounts please post below. DON'T LET THIS THREAD DIE. :D

Thank You,

MetaMav

P.S. I uploaded my S4's (SCH-I545) vold.fstab if anyone would like to venture at modifying it for this purpose.