Moving Applications to Media Partition

[kinchoong]

Discussion thread for Moving Applications to Media Partition. If you would like to add a comment, click the Post Reply button.

[kim1406]

Thanks. I just followed this method and it works great on my 1.1.2 firmware.

[NetMage]

I saw someone recommend using
cp -rp /Applications /var/root/Applications

to preserve timestamps, etc. Maybe this would be a good idea?

[imode]

agreed this is necessary

[pzuffa]

Hi! I am not very familiar with terminal and I cannot manage to create a valid symlink when trying to move the apps directory into my iphone 1.1.2 media partition ("1n command not found"). Is there anybody willing to help me? Thanks.

[wizdave]

This was a very useful article for me. Several of my programs stopped being able to save changes to their configurations or didn't work correctly because I hit the 300 MB limit of the root partition since I have installed a lot of different apps.

The following is what I used when moving folders to the media partition (example replacing {OriginalPath} with /Applications and {NewPath} with /var/Applications):
cp -R -pv {OriginalPath} {NewPath}
rm -rf {OriginalPath} && ln -s {NewPath} {OriginalPath}

I was able to move the following folders without any problems as well: /Library/Ringtones, /Library/Wallpaper, /System/Library/Fonts, and /var/opt (where Perl is installed).

One warning: it can be dangerous to move certain folders such as /usr, and likely others. I got a little carried away and tried to move /usr which made my iPhone not be able to launch any applications at first and when I tried restarting it, my iPhone kept rebooting itself. I managed to restore the phone to the latest patch but I lost all my apps and settings

BTW, pzuffa if you haven't figured out your problem yet - the command is LN (ell-n) not 1n (one-n), which is an abbreviation of link.

[leoiv]

You can use BossTool to easily free space by moving Fonts, Ringtones and Applications from the 300Mb partition; you better do it before you install new apps/fonts/ringtones, or on a restored iPhone though. And don't forget to move first fonts and ringtones, then apps.

[hhtoh88]

I tried to follow the instructions and it didnt work. When i launched the installer, it gave me an error message. Then i tried to reverse the process. It didnt work as well. So i manually copy the application folder back to the original directory. Now my iphone hangs when i restart. It shows the apple logo and the spinning wheel. Im stuck and i cant do anything. Please please help.

[Neo-Tech]

BossTool can only be used once, so for example if I install lots of apps and I reach my limit and move apps it's ok. However if I reach it again, can I move them again?

[LGgeek]

I pawned my phone and it worked fine but I notice the first partition seems kind of large does it need to be that big (1.5 gig) ? I always use bosstools to move fonts,ringtones,etc. Is there a way to reduce the size ?

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/disk0s1 1.5G 404M 1.1G 28% /
devfs 26K 26K 0 100% /dev
/dev/disk0s2 6.1G 2.2G 4.0G 35% /private/var