[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] JonW434:
Yep, Australia day here in about an hour or two.. what a dorky way it will be to spend it, tinkering with phones.. haha. :)

This stuff is starting to make a little more sense now.. some of it. A lot of what you said is along the same lines as what I was thinking, but your background knowledge of all of these things (especially the L01, L02 and L03 thing) is really interesting. A lot of my stuff is blatant and blunt trial and error and you actually know what you are doing.. in an organised and thought out manner.. lol.

Yeah I did go back and reread most (or all) of those posts. I actually had plenty of time because I did try a backup last night but it failed after 4 hours. So I had nothing to do but read! I don't know why it failed, but I think it might be the speed of the backup sd card I was using, it was so slow.. like 1-2mb per second or something. I benchmarked it today with HD Tune Pro and a card reader in Windows and after it gets more than 3gb on it, it's performance drops to like 2mb/s. So it's like.. 40.. 40.. 38.. 40.. 2... 2... 2.. 2.. 2.. 2.. 2.. 2.. damn Sandisk, what a rip off. The other one I bought (I got two together) failed early on.. so I haven't had good experience with those. It's a year or two later now, and the Extreme ones are more affordable. I think they should prove to be both faster and more reliable (hopefully). I'm not sure if those ones are ultra or not, but it's the grey and red ones. They probably aren't ultra but I didn't know much about this stuff when I bought them.

After the first backup failed, I tried to backup a second time (with file compression this time) and my battery went dead (I thought the phone would still be charging in TWRP), so when I woke up I had a low battery boot loop.. fun times. A week ago this would have been bad, but at the moment I had 3 other batteries to choose from. And a spare charger (spare phone). So I was able to switch them and continue on with my tinkering around.

Would you recommend using file compression for the backup? I chose against it and then instantly regretted it when I saw how long it would take (and also the 1500mb file size). Anyways, there's a new Sandisk Extreme coming.. and by the way, I think you are right in that those cards seem faster than the phone's HD itself. But it seems they are both bottlenecked, so they sort of get paired together and become of similar speed. With the internal hard drive being the bottleneck rather than the card. I'm not sure if the low speed of that dodgy other card is the reason for the failed backup, but within a day or two I should get an answer on that.

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I won't quote each part but I'll try and summarize the whole partition thing. Maybe it's just a habit I have for over 10-20 years of Windows use, but when trying things, I always know in the back of my mind that I can't keep the OS like this. It'll have a bunch of left over registry entries or device driver problems. So if I know I'm going to have to format/reinstall.. I may as well play around. So you are right in a lot of what you've been saying about all of that stuff. There's a lot of wisdom behind those words. It's just that I've been operating from a point of view of.. if anything breaks, I'm already open to reinstalling whenever I need to. There's nothing on there that I can't afford to lose, everything is written down or saved somewhere (list of apps I've tried, contacts backed up, SMS messages etc).

But in the meantime.. lets play around and see what happens if I do this.. or that.. etc.

The order of how I did it.. you're right in that I didn't understand the basic Android interface enough early on. Still don't understand it now, but I'm slowly starting to make more sense of it. And I did start off, pretty much ignoring the storage options altogether. I wanted to ensure the OS itself was usable and stable (because if it wasn't, I could load a new ROM image to the external and start again). Then at some point, I was happy with the OS, and did choose the card as internal and committed to trying out that OS for a bit (but didn't do the developers option thing).

I never thought I'd need to merge anything over manually, I thought it'd do it automatically.. by itself (for no apparent reason, I just assumed it). Once I saw your post.. I turned on the developers options thing, manually switched them all over. And saw that all new ones were now installing directly onto the external (which IS f2fs in OctOS by the way). And APP2SD in my own experience has handled the whole thing seamlessly. Possibly due to recent updates.. I'm not sure. I've had good experiences with both partition tools in my short experience with it. The OctOS is 331 version, recommended as being a stable/decent version from websites around the place. The proper date on it is 20170331. Now that i realise that, I feel silly for thinking of it as the 331 version.. oh well. By the way, part of this came about because I got a new VPN last week and I needed Android 5.0+ to use the app. I forgot to mention that in earlier posts. That combined with a failing battery led me into a deep dive into the pool of Android on very short notice. And now I'm typing messages on an Android developers forum.. what? :eek:

By the way, I might be getting things wrong in terms of misunderstanding the specifics of what you said.. but often, I'll go back and reread and it makes sense a second or third time.

Going back to the migration thing, once everything was going well with that initial migration (and confirming the SD card swap method works), I decided to 'try' the extra partition. The icons problem had already occurred by the way. The issue occurred while I was trying to do the regular way. The problem was.. all of that above was without doing a single restart. And it had seemed like all was great, and then upon restarting this new problem emerged. This was sort of a reason why I decided to take the risk, cause I figured I'd reinstall all of the apps manually again anyway. I figured I'd format the external/adoptive drive and then just reinstall everything again and thought I may as well try to add an extra partition. It handled the f2fs/fat32/swap thing seamlessly and I was able to confirm that TWRP would see the fat32 partition and a SuperSU zip that I'd put on there. I did notice the phone get a tad slower though, and this could be the reason for the higher CPU temp. Maybe managing as internal and portable simultaneously sort of stresses everything too much? The icon thing is a common problem by the way, by that I mean.. other people have had it when I did some searches about the issue. It seems to always happen when porting/moving apps to the external card. Some were able to fix it and others weren't.. but let's see what happens. At least now I know what to look for, and can restart more frequently and see if there is something I can pinpoint that I did in between restarts that triggered it.

I will be retesting all of this on a new clean installation shortly, only now I'll know a bit more of what to expect and hopefully what order to do these things in. I haven't had a chance to install LineageOS due to the backup problem and other things. But I decided to embrace it a bit and experiment with every random thing I could, while knowing I'm doing a reset/reinstall very soon. I don't think that it was the speed of the phone being the issue by the way, I never noticed any icons pop up. It was either they'd be there initially (impressively so), or they'd never be there. In one of my experiments last night I did experience the grey icons thing.. (intentionally) but APP2SD has a great broken APK cleaner that fixes it in 30 seconds. Whether it's the OC or the fast SD card.. the performance of the phone is ok.. considering the age of it. It's just that certain websites can stress it badly. 3D Mark GPU test while charging is fine. But certain websites like a weather radar site I use peg the CPU at full clocks 100% usage and it's ugly. Temp goes to 70C and wants to keep climbing but fortunately my CPU monitoring program (or maybe the OS itself) throttles it. The high temps thing is interesting.. something to look forward to when I finally get a new one.. a fast phone that doesn't warm my hands up. Useful in winter I guess. Yesterday I had chilli at one point and I couldn't work out if my hands were burning from the chilli, the phone or both.. :crying:

I need to confirm all of this again on a clean install but yeah. And yeah, in the long term I do see committing to the internal as being soley internal. The temps seemed a little lower and things are just simpler that way. The swap SD card method is ok and it's rare you ever need to do it. But the icons thing, I really need to find a way to fix that. Hopefully on a fresh install, in the correct order on a clean system everything will migrate and link without issue. At this stage, I'm thinking to migrate and do all that stuff before ever installing any user apps. Treating it as internal from the very first boot screen after the sign up into Google.

I need to look into that (the widget thing). I don't even know which features each one has, it was a rushed and rough decision.. but outside of the widgets (have I even tried running one.. *memory blank*) everything else has been fine. Gmail, Translate and Maps all worked fine from the external/adoptive drive. I will consider what you said though, as it might be safer to do it that way. And I need to figure out if I need/want widgets. I actually removed the google search thing on the home screen for more app icons. I prefer to just go to browser directly with google as the home page. But either way, I need to consider the feature list of all of GAPPS a bit more closely though.

Now that you say that, I'm wondering why I even wanted to put it there in the first place. I guess I wasn't even thinking about it properly. I'm not even sure what the difference is between internal/system and if putting it in system has any functionality at all. I guess system prevents it from being uninstalled? Or modified at all? Maybe they just add that option to show off the capabilities of their program? But seriously.. I guess I saw a time in the future where I might have to (a guide tells me for a specific situation to do it) and I wondered whether I should try it now. The way you explained it makes sense in terms of altering the partition in custom environment.

Hopefully I can figure these things out over the coming days. A lot of the benchmarking and experiments has just been for fun, as the core parts have actually worked pretty well outside of my own lack of understanding and trying to learn how it all works. File Manager type stuff is a pain without a mouse and keyboard shortcuts but it's slowly starting to become more familiar and less of a mystery. And in terms of the experiments.. it's a bit like a first car.. good to have a used and banged up one so that if you crash, you can learn not to do that once you get the shiny new one. :)

Cheers.