How to setup an Android Virtual Device with a data partition larger than 200 MB?

Question

Whatever I do, I can't properly setup a virtual android device with a /data partition larger than 200 MB. What's the proper/definitive way to setup or grow the /data partition?

I am assuming there is a bug somewhere in one of the tool, so basically I am looking for a workaround.

Using the AVD tool to creates a new AVD doesn't seems to be properly setup with the value entered in the 'Internal storage' field although the 'disk.dataPartition.size' parameter does get the appropriate value:

$ grep "size" *.ini
config.ini:disk.dataPartition.size=1024M
config.ini:sdcard.size=512M
hardware-qemu.ini:disk.cachePartition.size = 66m
hardware-qemu.ini:disk.systemPartition.size = 550m
hardware-qemu.ini:disk.dataPartition.size = 1g

Just listing the files ...

$ ls -alsh
total 979M
   0 drwxr-xr-x 12 user staff  408 jui 13 11:35 .
   0 drwxr-xr-x  7 user staff  238 jui 13 11:38 ..
 66M -rw-------  1 user staff  66M jui 13 11:38 cache.img
4,0K -rw-r--r--  1 user staff  668 jui 13 11:34 config.ini
4,0K -rw-r--r--  1 user staff 1,8K jui 13 11:35 hardware-qemu.ini
512M -rw-r--r--  1 user staff 512M jui 13 11:38 sdcard.img
200M -rw-------  1 user staff 200M jui 13 11:38 userdata-qemu.img
200M -rw-r--r--  1 user staff 200M jui 13 11:34 userdata.img

Then on lauching the virtual device, disk free says it's only 200MB:

$ adb shell df
Filesystem               Size     Used     Free   Blksize
/dev                   373.7M   128.0K   373.6M   4096
/sys/fs/cgroup         373.7M    12.0K   373.7M   4096
/mnt/asec              373.7M     0.0K   373.7M   4096
/mnt/obb               373.7M     0.0K   373.7M   4096
/system                541.9M   260.8M   281.1M   4096
/data                  197.0M    31.3M   165.7M   4096
/cache                  65.0M     4.1M    60.9M   4096
/mnt/media_rw/sdcard   510.0M    22.0K   510.0M   2048
/storage/sdcard        510.0M    22.0K   510.0M   2048

Then, if I try something proposed in this question: Android 4.4 Virtual Device Internal Storage Will Not Resize

Then the volume ends up mounted read-only which means It's pretty much useless:

$ adb install someApp.apk
pkg: /data/local/tmp/someApp.apk
Failure [INSTALL_FAILED_INSUFFICIENT_STORAGE]
rm failed for /data/local/tmp/someApp.apk, Read-only file system

And also visible at boot time ...

$ adb shell dmesg
...
<2>EXT4-fs error (device mtdblock1): ext4_mb_generate_buddy:741: group 2, 32366 clusters in bitmap, 32370 in gd
<3>Aborting journal on device mtdblock1-8.
<2>EXT4-fs (mtdblock1): Remounting filesystem read-only
<2>EXT4-fs error (device mtdblock1) in ext4_reserve_inode_write:4356: Journal has aborted
<2>EXT4-fs error (device mtdblock1) in ext4_evict_inode:171: Journal has aborted
<4>QEMU Pipe Device:rw, wait_event error
...

My setup:

• OSX 10.10.3
• Android SDK (latest as of June 13th 2015)
• Android SDK Tools 24.3.2

Answer 1

After resetting the device in Android Device Manger I set the DataPartition via the GUI to 2GB. Restarted the device but the dataPartition was still 200mb. (seen in the hardware-qemu.ini).

I noticed the Device Manager wrote to the config.ini the line

disk.dataPartition.size=2 GB

So what I found worked for me was:

1. Factory Reset the device

2. Manually edit the config.ini to read 2000m not (not 2 G) I think in my case the GUI configuration was writing an invalid value for dataPartition size.

   disk.dataPartition.size=2000m

3. Restart the device

Answer 2

After modifying disk.dataPartition.size parameter in config.ini , wipe the data of the avd in Android Virtual Device Manager

.

Starting the emulator after above step will create the data partition with the size in config.ini.