[Samsung Galaxy Tab A series Guides, News, & Discus] larpoux:
Hello folks. Before going further I need to apologize. I really fighted to use Link2SD on my Galaxy tablet and I succeeded more or less. I thought that my tentative could be useful to others. So I posted this topic.

I worked a little more, and now I am convinced that I was wrong from the beginning.

The reality is that Apps2SD and Link2SD are obsolete utilities.

Forget creating a second volume on your external SD Card :

- Android/Samsung declare your SD Card as corrupted and always wants to reformat it.

- TWRP mounts the wrong partition and you have to manually unmout it and remount the good one

- The partitions need to be declared with a wrong type and this is really not clean

etc...

I suggest that you do not loose your time, forget Link2SD, and read this excellent topic:

https://www.xda-developers.com/divi...gles-fuse-replacement-will-reduce-io-overhead

My Galaxy tab A has only 11 Go available for the user. I bought a 128 Go external SD card to extend both /storage/emulated/0 and /data.

When you first install your SD Card, Android automatically mount this card as /storage/xxxx-xxxx.

This is a FAT volume extended on all your SD Card (128 GB for me).

This is fine for storing ebooks, music, video, and your backups.

But impossible for Link2SD to move your apps on this volume and put a symbolic link on the previous location, because FAT is not a UNIX file system. Link2SD (or Apps2SD) needs a second disk volume on partition 2 (/dev/block/mmcblk1p2) formatted with a UNIX file system (ext4 is fine).

Of course you need to have rooted your device. [A non rooted tablet is not better than a vulgar iPhone ;) ]

To re-partition my SD Card I used ROEHSOFT PARTITION TOOL (SD-USB). (I tried unsuccessfully Aparted, it crashed every time I launch it). ROEHSOFT is convenient but tricky to be used by an advanced user :

- You cannot create a partition in a specific slot (for example /dev/block/mmcblk1p2): It automatically use first slot for the first partition you create, the second slot for the following partition, and so on.

- If you try to foul it, deleting a partition and recreating it in another empty space, it suddenly decides to reorganize your 4 slots. It really wants /dev/block/mmcblk1p1 to be the first partition on your SD Card, /dev/block/mmcblk1p2 the following, etc...

- You cannot create a partition at a specific offset inside an empty space.

After fighting with ROEHSOFT I finally won. I discovered too late that "fdisk" is part of BusyBox. If you know "fdisk" my advice is to use it instead of fighting with a software which pretends to be user friendly but is too limited.

OK, stop bla-bla and work.

1 - Dismount your SD Card : Parameters/Device Maintenance/Storage/Menu-Storage Parameter/Dismount

2 - Delete the only one partition

3 - For a misterious reason, my Android was not happy with his FAT volume on /dev/block/mmcblk1p1. Link2SD wants his UNIX volume on /dev/block/mmcblk1p2. So, if you use ROEHSOFT you need now to create a small dummy partition on /dev/block/mmcblk1p1. For me I created a 4 Go partition to be used by Linux Deploy. This partition needs to be declared as FAT32 (LBA) but should not be formatted as a FAT file system. EXT4 is a good choice.

4 - Create the second partition for Link2SD. I suggest not too much space for it, because you probably want a huge space for the third partion. This partition needs to be declared as FAT32 (LBA) but should be formatted with a UNIX file system. EXT4 is a good choice.

5 - Create the third partition to be used as SD extension for Android. This partition should be very large : you will store on it your music, your movies, your ebooks, and above all your backups. This partition needs to be declared as FAT32 (LBA). I formatted this partition as a EXFAT file system.

6 - Reboot. If you are lucky you will get two notifications : one saying that you have a corrupted memory card, and one saying that you are ready for media files. You will get those two notifications at each reboot.

8 - Recreate mounting scripts inside Lin2SD (or Apps2SD), and reboot.

7 - If you are a UNIX user just type "df -h" in a terminal to verify that the two partitions are mounted with correct sizes).

8 - You can look what Android think of your partitioning :

/Parameters/Device Maintenance/Storage/Menu:Storage Parameter/.

Do not try to mount the two first volumes and NEVER try to reformat them with Android. Those volumes are declared as corrupted but this is normal. Android does not expect to find a UNIX file system on a partition declared FAT32.

If one day, you forget this and ask to Android to reformat a corrupted partition you will have the terrible surprise that Android will not only erase your partition, but will erase everything and recreate one and only one big empty partition. (I guess that you keep all your backups on this SD Card, like me, so this is a really bad surprise).

Do not ask me why Android does not want his SD-Card on first partition. I have no idea. I guess that Android or Samsung reserve this partition for something else.

Do not ask why I had to declared all my partitions as FAT32 even if two of them are formatted as EXT4. I just realized that this configuration works well after fighting during a full day.

I hope that this topic will help some of you.