Erroneus - An erroneous trophy hunter...

Now this tip is for rooted Android phones with S-OFF, and if moving to SD, who are running with a SD-EXT partition and I would recommend only using this when running with a fast SD card, which means from class 6 and up. Also it’s required to have ClockworkMod installed. If you don’t know how to root and S-OFF your phone or install ClockworkMod, go search at Youtube, there are plenty guides there, so I’m not making another one.

Dalvik-cache is a cache for every app on your Android phone, which speeds up the apps. Dalvik-cache is normally stored on the internally memory, so if you have really many apps installed, it can become quite big and a problem. You can wipe the cache from eg. ClockworkMod and clean up unused items in the cache, but this will properly only free up a few MB’s, as the cache is rebuilt for every installed app at next boot. You can check how big your dalvik-cache is by opening up a terminal app, eg. like ConnectBot and running thw following commands:

• su (for getting root)
• du -hcs /data/dalvik-cache

It should say something like: 45.2M /data/dalvik-cache

The dalvik-cache can be moved to either the cache partition or the SD-EXT partition, do NOT move it to the normal SDCARD partition.

The best choice is the cache partition, as this is the safest and does not requires you to use a fast SD card, as /cache is stored at internally memory. But first you have to make sure your cache partition is big enough. Run the command df from ConnectBot and you should get a list of the different mounts and partitions on your phone. Look for the following line: /dev/block/mtdblock4 40960 1672 39288 4% /cache

If your are using SD-EXT, you should also have a line ending with /SD-EXT and how big your SD-EXT partition on your SD-card is.

In my case I had 39288 bytes, which equals 39MB left on my cache partition. This means my cache partition was to small, so I had to use my SD-EXT for dalvik-cache. Now if your cache partition is big enough and remember to leave some room, move your dalvik-cache to the cache partition.

And now for the fun stuff, how to actually move dalvik-cache to either /cache or /SD-EXT. But before you move on, make sure you have done a backup of your system, so in case something went wrong, you can always restore. The easiest way, is to use the backup feature from ClockworkMod Recovery, which stores the backup on your SD card and it can be restored also from ClockworkMod Recovery.

Moving the dalvik-cache, is done from ClockworkMod Recovery, by running a script, which is stored in a install zip package. Save the zip on your sdcard and use “Install zip from sdcard -> Choose zip from sdcard” in ClockworkMod Recovery.

• If moving dalvik-cache to /cache - Install this zip from ClockworkMod Recovery
• If moving dalvik-cache to /SD-EXT - Install this zip from ClockworkMod Recovery

When done, reboot the phone and have some extra patience, as it takes a bit longer the first time to start up. Now the dalvik-cache should be moved, which you can check by browsing to /data/dalvik-cache in eg. Root Explorer and then look at the top and see how much space are left. Now run the command df in ConnectBot and compare, to see what partition the dalvik-cache is on.

Also read my other tip for HTC Desire phones, which will be up later, on how to use a custom HBOOT, which leaves up more space for your /data partition and way less for /cache and /system. Combining a big /data partition and /sd-ext, should leave lots of space internally for eg. dalvik-cache and other stuff, which normally runs from /data.