Installer: Running out of Disk Space

[XavierAlucard]

Quick question. I receive the message that I am running out of disk space when I'm in installer. I started at 100 MB or so for installer way back when.

My question is:

Is there a way to up the available space for Installer, so I can go install app crazy?


~Xavier

[Jimbo]

Not without repartitioning the volumes, which would involve restoring the phone, but I don't know of anyone that has tried this yet. I'm assuming that during the restore process, the flash RAM in the phone gets formatted and partitioned, but nobody that I've heard of has attempted to hack this yet.

[jujubeanser]

It told me I was out of space awhile back too, unfortunately the only fix possible in my experience was a restore, then after adding everything back ive been fine ever since

[hillie]

If someone ported diskutility over it would be possible to repartition the phone but not advisable, for two reasons:

1. We do not know if these are REAL partitions that can be changed, or if it's something hardcoded into the hardware
2. This could be dangerous for firmware updates, etc. they might brick the phone, in a bad way.

...However there is a way to get more space for apps, though it is a hack.

First you need to edit /etc/fstab so and take the noexec out of the options for the /private/var partition, so that files can be executable on that partition, then ssh into the phone and do something like this:

mkdir ~/extra_space
mv /Applications ~/extra_space
ln -s /private/var/root/extra_space/Applications /Applications

Now all your Applications will exist in the 7.5gb partition.

Note: I have not tried this on an iPhone and thus cannot guarantee it will work, however, being a true Darwin installation, it SHOULD work because of the way that Unix systems work. You can also play it safe by moving individual applications over and creating symlinks for them. just keep in mind symlinks will take up 1 block of space each, that's usually from 1-4k depending on the inode size the fs was formatted with. not a big deal but just something to keep in mind, just coz it says 0 bytes in the file listing doesn't mean it doesn't use up space =)

This is a simple workaround for running out of space that's used a lot in the Unix world, or at least, I have used it a lot in the past

now of course i'm not sure if /Applications is where everything is put or what, but it will at least help the situation. The lack of "du" has made it difficult to easily assertain exactly where all the space is being used up on the phone.

Perhaps my first toolchain project will be porting du as that is an immensely useful command.

Edit: one of the biggest uses of space is stuff like Perl, Python etc. I am not sure where Python is installed but Perl is installed in /opt . if you move /opt to somewhere in /private/var and then symlink it to /opt, and do the same for /usr/local (IF python is installed there) then it will free up a HUGE chunk of space on the smaller system partition.

[Jimbo]

hillie, excellent idea, I was thinking along those lines myself, but hadn't tried it yet (don't have time right now to deal with a restore if things go bad). I think it'll be a given that the next firmware update would want to restore a phone in such a configuration, but then, I'm used to that.

[hillie]

that's why i suggested trying with individual apps first.. i have moved apps out and into /Applications many many times..

but who knows what might happen if /Applications dissapears completely. even if just for the few seconds it takes to type out the ln command after moving it.

[scr4p]

that's why i suggested trying with individual apps first.. i have moved apps out and into /Applications many many times..

but who knows what might happen if /Applications dissapears completely. even if just for the few seconds it takes to type out the ln command after moving it.

I have done this and it worked great. I posted it here: http://www.modmyi.com/forums/showthr...g+applications before I saw this post.

-Steve