Using The Sd Card In An Android Phone As Your Portable Computer Repair Kit

[SomethingToChatWith]

I'm pretty happy with my new phone. Because it has 16GB of internal storage, I don't need the 2GB MicroSD in it for anything in particular, so I would like to use it as a computer repair USB replacement for a USB watch I used to carry around with me. It was very difficult trying to get the SD card set as active from Windows so I got everything setup in Ubuntu. Put Kon-Boot on there to test things out and sure enough I was able to boot it :)

Theres a problem though. Anytime I use Disk Utility to format the SD card with a MBR table my phone well see the card as corrupted when scanning for media whenever I unmount it from my computer. This is an issue because when its "corrupted" the phone well not mount it when I connect my phone back to my computer unless I format the card first on the phone.

Anyone else around here use their phones as their computer repair kits that might know of a way to to create the MBR table so the phone doesn't complain? It needs to be MBR formatted if I want the partition to be bootable (which I do, since I've got some boot discs I want to throw on there).

[okiwan]

your phone will probably only except fat32 formats. if you root your phone an flash a different rom, certain kernels (i dont know which ones) will allow different partitions on the sd card.

[digip]

You can try to create multiple partitions (probably have to do so under linux, windows won't do it be default on removable drives). One side for phone, and formatted under the phone as fat or whatever it uses, the other side formatted for the tools, probably as EXT3 or such using linux. See if that helps.

I know that when I formatted my thumb drives under linux, I could create multiple partitions and file systems, where one part was fat and the other EXT3. When booted back in windows, it could only see the FAT partition, and I could format it under windows just fine. It also reduces the total space available to the windows side, but that is expected. Afterwards, I was able to boot off it, dual booting both Windows XP PE and BackTrack using grub. Once up and running in BackTrack(from the fat side) I was able to see all my files hidden on the EXT3 Partition and save files, read and write to it, etc.

[SomethingToChatWith]

I'm not having an issue with formatting/partitioning at all, except for the fact whenever I disconnect from the computer my phone says the SD card is corrupted. I've formatted as fat32, and I don't need multiple partitions, just 1. It likes fat32 just fine, its only when I prep the disk with an MBR table that allows me to make the partition active and bootable. It has to be a Windows friendly filesystem as most of the tools are Windows based.

Edited October 24, 2010 by JustinW

[okiwan]

It has to be a Windows friendly filesystem

never heard of that. im pretty sure its a myth.

[Infiltrator]

It has to be a Windows friendly filesystem as most of the tools are Windows based.

No offence to Windows users, I am a windows user myself too, but unfortunately Microsoft will have to do a better job next time.

Two things you could do are:

1. Use one SD for windows

2. And another one for you phone

That's the only way you may be able to work around this problems.

[Guest Deleted_Account]

I use the aforementioned partition method with my desire and it works perfectly fine. Desire only sees the fat32 partition and when I boot on my comp it boots from the EXT3 partition with BT4 on it. All done on an 8GB SDHC card.

[SomethingToChatWith]

I use the aforementioned partition method with my desire and it works perfectly fine. Desire only sees the fat32 partition and when I boot on my comp it boots from the EXT3 partition with BT4 on it. All done on an 8GB SDHC card.

What tools/steps did you use to prep the card and partition it? I'm thinking if I initialize the card in Ubuntu and format it in Windows maybe it'll like it?

Edited October 24, 2010 by JustinW