Make phone mount ONLY SD to USB, no "phone storage"?

[acslam]

I tried posting in help but maybe I'll get something more direct here.

Under 2.1, my phone mounted only the SD card when I plugged it into usb. I had it setup to do this automatically, IE, "disk drive" and "do not ask me".

My car stereo ONLY reads the first partition presented. Can't change this, but it worked flawlessly on under 2.1 because of the automatic "bug".

I now have virtuous 3. The bug that caused this seems fixed, so now when set to "disk drive" and "don't ask", the phone properly presents BOTH SD and "phone storage" to the host device. It's neat for my computer, but.........

This sucks for my car stereo, which now can't see the SD card cause it's the second device, and hence I have no music.

So, how can I take my fancy froyo rom, and configure it how it used to be - when going into a usb port, to mount ONLY the SD card as a disk drive, and not present the "phone storage" area at all?

I feel like I should have already found the answer to this, but I've been trying for three days without success. I can't imagine it's very hard - I just want the phone to function exactly as it did under 2.1, because the system was PERFECT for me that way. Worked every time. Now the stereo barely recognizes that ANYTHING is plugged in, and when it does, it's the wrong partition. Other than that, I love froyo and the basic enhancements in it.

Has anyone got any insight into this?

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[thedskennedy]

Hey acslam, Could not find your other post. I could not get some other roms to work with car audio USB, but was able to get MIUI 10 to work. On MIUI i plugged in to radio, pulled down notification screen, turned off debugging, mounted sd. It worked. going to try on a different ROM in a bit.

[acslam]

Hmm....thanks for the input. Stock 2.1 worked flawlessly and every single time. Virtuous DOES properly present the partitions...just the radio can't see the second one, which happens to be the one i need. I really just need the phone to either change the order it presents partitions in, or ignore one, and this seems like it should be an extremely simple setting that ought to be part of the os to begin with.

Does anybody have some way I can just literally switch drive letters? Maybe make the SD card become the first presented partition?

This is so frustrating. I know that even if another rom can be read by a stereo, its still likely to have the same problem that I can't choose WHICH partitions to automount.

[Fudsey]

If you install a theme with PSCII.apk in the system/app folder it may block the internal storage from showing. At least it is for some while using R-Evo-lution ROM and FrankenRom.

[acslam]

Interesting, could you elaborate a tad more on this? I rooted mostly for the usage of wifi tether and the ability to load roms, but virtuous is the first I've loaded, and I never even considered themes. If its useful info though, one other issue I need to address is that wii controllers won't work with a sense rom, and so I am becoming more and more interested in trying a sense-less rom in order to fix that issue...would a "theme" become more useful to me then?

[acslam]

Ok, so I tried a few more things, and have the following results:

Tried several market apps that propose to mount the SD card. They worked fine on the computer, but the car stereo couldn't read ANYTHING from them. This is in contrast to the original problem, ONLY the first partition presented, and the first one that the phone presents is "phone storage".

I want to note here that the stereo DOES read "phone storage" just fine, and it seems to read it consistently every time. The problem is that the phone is presenting "phone storage" as the first thing to be read, instead of the SD card, like it used to.

Tried putting music onto the phone storage portion just to see what happens. Car stereo reads it fine, no problem, plays just like it did before. The major issue is that I have much more music than this.

Also, using the aux line input on the stereo for the rest of the music, the phones internal music player now seems to have issues reading music that's split between phone storage and SD card???? This is new to me, I thought the internal player could read both partitions provided they weren't in "disk drive" mode. Apparently not? It only sees the library thats in phone storage, OR the SD card, at any given time. Worse yet, I've seen it read both with no apparent means of deciding which it's going to use.

I did some research on this PSCII.apk, and found that I actually have this file in my own system/app directory. I tried "installing" it just to see what would happen, and unfortunately it just refuses to install. I know you mentioned a theme....I know this sounds stupid but is a theme roughly equivalent to what it was in windows mobile? I will try looking into themes more....but I think this is something that should require some tweaking of that htc popup that comes when you plug into a usb port. Is there some way to maybe modify that program with a setting for SD only, PS only, or both at once?

I'd be willing to pay a developer something simply to make that ONE alteration - because that popup, or whatever programming the phone uses to present itself as a disk drive, is the ONE thing that the stereo can actually read.

So basically, I'm back at square one - how can I force the phone to either NOT present "phone storage" at all, OR, how can I force it to present SD CARD as the FIRST available partition??? I want to stress that the HTC/android "disk drive" program DOES get read FINE by the stereo, and in fact it's the only means that the stereo can read, I JUST need to either turn off or "hide" the phone storage portion. This shouldn't be a 3rd party app, this should be something inside the OS itself that I'm looking for, but I just can't find it anywhere.

This was the default behavior in 2.1, I can't believe it's this difficult to find a solution to this, I only wish I knew more about programming that I might be able to change the program myself.......

Maybe I should just go back to 2.1? I really hate to lose the faster kernel though..... that would be kind of stupid, just to replicate a bug!

[jpr]

It just struck me that there's another possibility: leaving your music in its directory on the sdcard where it prefers to live (and where you have more space, duh!) and creating a symlink to said directory in the main phone storage. Are you comfortable enough on Unix|Linux to do that? Otherwise I can figure out the steps.

[acslam]

I've not much experience in unix/linux but am absolutely willing to learn, and on the windows side have years of experience from building PC's to being the network admin for a local private school. If you can show me the basic steps, I'd be all about giving it a try. If it's something that the stereo can read, hell yeah! Is this something akin to making a batch file? like, create it in txt and then rename the resulting file?

[jpr]

Nothing to do with batch files.
There will be a directory, for example /mnt/sdcard/music, where your music files are stored. Replace my made-up name by the actual name in your case.
If you fire up adb, from the Android SDK, you can get to where you are actually sitting in a command shell on the phone.
You then want to run the command " ln -s /mnt/sdcard/music /music". As I remarked before, "music" may not be the actual name in your case, it's just my example name.
Once you've done that, then any reference to /mnt/sdcard/music/songNumber1 is just as well found by looking for /music/songNumber1.

IOW, the actual full pathname to the directory /mnt/sdcard/music can be referred to by the symbolic link thereto which has been created, namely /music.

[doug piston]

I hope I am not the only one who understood that. Great post jpr.

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