Hacking Homebrew Android & AMS partition

[binkinator]

Sorry for my late reply, much work today.

No worries. same here. just getting around to serious, non-work related thoughts again.

I always wanted to write a guide but never made it. And nobody at psxtools was interested either. Many also think you will be banned for it.

it’s unfortunate when other people don’t want to learn. This is really cool stuff.

I've had Horizon, Android and Linux together on the emmc for 1.5 years. So far without a ban. And I play often Minecraft online.

If you have a normal 32gb emmc you have 2 possible solutions.
1. Dump your rawnand.bin and nuke your emmc
2. resize your user partition and add a partition for Ubuntu

1. Dump and nuke…do you mean get rid of it completely and not use HOS at all until I decide to restore from backup at later date?
2. This makes more sense to me as I would like to retain all functionality.

If you need a quick guide I can write one for you.

Not necessary at this point. You have given plenty of guidance. I’m pretty sure I understand the process now and am ready for the challenge (and possible loss of my Switch!)

it runs better than on an SD card (no slowdowns) but emulation doesn't get any better. you can roughly compare it to an SSD.
but the effort is not worth it if you have no greater EMMC.
Android on the emmc responds much faster than from the SD card. This is because the access times are almost twice as fast.

this is exciting and will be the excuse I tell my wife for why I’m spending so much money on my toys.

For Android (and Linux) is guide on Switchroot wiki.
https://wiki.switchroot.org/en/Documentation/EMMC

^^Great document. Everything makes total sense now. Thank you!


256G emmc chips have gotten a little more expensive but having Android (and L4T) on emmc is the use case I was looking for to do the 32G -> 256G chip swap. To be honest I really want to do it just to learn how to reball an emmc.

here is my plan (please tell me if it is foolish):
1) use Ubuntu (raspberry pi) to mount my Switch emmc via Hekate and resize User partition to include 8G for Android and 8G for L4T
2) use remainder of User for HOS. I don’t use save games that heavily so I don’t use/need a lot of emmc space
3) Experience using Android and L4T on emmc with limited HOS space while I wait for 256G chip to arrive.
4) buy one of these:
New $75
Second hand $68 new is $176? WTF?
5) buy this reader
6) buy reball gear
7a) copy 32G to 256G and expand Android to 32G and Linux to 32G and HOS to 192G
or
7b) Start from scratch and repartition/reinstall everything

 

[RaynorBlackwood]

Congratulations man! What are you going to take on next?

My signature block has a whole bunch of tricks that I’ve used. You might find something of interest there or in the second link of homebrew that I have tested and run on my switch.

I highly recommend the Trinket M0 project. Frustrating and scary at times but the reward of never having to inject a payload ever again is great!

Oh yes im happy i did it finally. At this point i cant do anything more, cause of not enough space on SD, plenty of Games installed right now.
I will study about Trinket M0, sounds interesting, but "Minerva" sounds similar.

 

[RaynorBlackwood]

About the "Trinket M0" ... I dont feel good by changing something on Hardware, i want to keep my switch's Hardware the same, software changes are hot enough.

 

[binkinator]

About the "Trinket M0" ... I dont feel good by changing something on Hardware, i want to keep my switch's Hardware the same, software changes are hot enough.

To each his own. It's a big leap (and a bit of risk) and it does nothing additional to the key point of enjoying games on your switch. It's just a convenience feature.

 

[RaynorBlackwood]

I would add more RAM, but not bigger internal Space.
I need some help to Backup for Android, i was using the "team" Installer of LineageOS and backuped it to internal Storage, but i cant reach it to save it to pc and if i try to backup to sd card, it doesnt work cause of missing write permission, can i change it?

 

[binkinator]

I would add more RAM, but not bigger internal Space.
I need some help to Backup for Android, i was using the "team" Installer of LineageOS and backuped it to internal Storage, but i cant reach it to save it to pc and if i try to backup to sd card, it doesnt work cause of missing write permission, can i change it?

Have you tried adb?

https://tech-latest.com/twrp-backup-directly-on-pc-with-adb/
(I know it’s deprecated but it might still work.)

you could mount the UDA partition on a Linux box:

https://stackpointer.io/mobile/android-mmc-mmcblk-partition-layout/259/

 

[RaynorBlackwood]

Hey guys, another problem... LineageOS does not save my Screen Lock settings, i chose PIN and typed it in twice and finished the setup, but it never comes up after locking the screen and trying to unlock it, just swiping and its unlocked... I tried to delete locking.db and gatekeeper.db but it doesnt help..

EDIT: i cant write to external SD, i was trying to set the chmod 777 of the whole SD Card, but its not possible with TWRP, it says ERROR 1.

 

[binkinator]

Hey guys, another problem... LineageOS does not save my Screen Lock settings, i chose PIN and typed it in twice and finished the setup, but it never comes up after locking the screen and trying to unlock it, just swiping and its unlocked... I tried to delete locking.db and gatekeeper.db but it doesnt help..

EDIT: i cant write to external SD, i was trying to set the chmod 777 of the whole SD Card, but its not possible with TWRP, it says ERROR 1.

As it turns out, I’m more of a casual consumer of Android as opposed to being one who wields that technology. The only interesting thing I could find is where the PIN information is kept in this article about removing it. Maybe it will help you pinpoint what’s going on or quite possibly useless.

https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/...rd-not-recognised-after-twrp-restore.3538438/