I have missing space on my System, how can I get it back?

Apparently there are a lot of people who have looked for help on this issue in various forms, so googling all day and looking around has not helped.

I have Android 4.0.4 and a Pantech Burst that has been rooted. I downloaded Titanium Backup and removed some programs that were perma installed by the manufacturer. I backed them up before I did this. Now the system drive shows I have a bunch of space free, 326MB out of 1GB. Using other apps I am not sure. "Drives" shows two internal storages "Data" which has 681MB used and 326MB free and "System" which has 464MB used and 77MB free. I assume these are both the internal partition.

Trying to install anything from the Play Store results in a 'insufficient space' except for some really small apps. Since I don't know exactly how much space I have to work with, I can only guess. Uninstalling some apps normally doesn't allow me to install new ones either. Sometimes the phone will just eat the space.

I tried restoring a app with Titanium Backup and it seems to have worked, however the app is no longer in my normal system 'apps' utility. So I can't modify it or uninstall it anymore.

The apps aren't backed up to the system storage, they're on external storage.

I tried clearing the dalvik cache and system cache, this didn't help or do anything.

Any sort of help would be great.

Originally Posted by bensam123

"Drives" shows two internal storages "Data" which has 681MB used and 326MB free and "System" which has 464MB used and 77MB free. I assume these are both the internal partition.

No, these are two different partitions, System and Data. It's like 2 different drives in a desktop.

Trying to install anything from the Play Store results in a 'insufficient space' except for some really small apps. Since I don't know exactly how much space I have to work with, I can only guess.

You have, according to your numbers, 681MB free. Since 4.04 needs about half of that to run, you don't have enough space to download an app then install it, except for the smallest apps. (If you install a 1MB app, it might take 5MB to install, since it needs temporary storage to unzip [an apk file is a zip file with the extension changed] and it may need storage to save data during installation.)

The apps aren't backed up to the system storage, they're on external storage.

Backups are data, so that's where the backups should be.

I tried clearing the dalvik cache and system cache

Separate partitions - it won't clear any space in the userdata partition, which is where you install apps.

You have a phone designed for Gingerbread 3 years ago, with what's now considered very wasteful partitioning, and you're trying to run apps written to run on current phones that have a lot more storage. That's one of the reasons carriers let you update phones so often - our phones outgrow the apps, because larger phones keep coming out, and "programming" practices keep getting sloppier, so apps keep getting larger. A 3 year old phone is good for phone calls, texts, web browsing and keeping a few apps on - that's about it.

Just to clarify, before using Titanium Backup, when you went into settings > apps, the freespace at the bottom would be out of 1GB and it sat around 130MB free with 870MB used when I couldn't install things anymore (insufficient storage). After deleting programs with Titanium backup I'm now at 605MB used with 403MB free. Each time I delete something (with the normal uninstall), I'm not getting free space back to use, including big programs. This is a new problem and that's plenty of free space for apps and has been in the past.

Everything was working fine till I started using Titanium Backup and now it seems as though the partition is corrupt. Is there a program meant for fixing partitions, like chkdsk for windows?

Also, using Titanium Backup I can restore programs that I have backed up and it seems to work fine. However, they no longer show up in settings > apps or the Play Store. If I didn't have free space available I wouldn't be able to do this. Facebook being one of the apps I backed up is definitely a larger app. If I try to reinstall the very same app with the play store it gives me a insufficient storage error.

My phone has 1GB of system storage, 16GB of internal 'external' storage which is permanent on my phone, and 4GB on a SDcard which I never use.

Imgur links I can't post because I don't have enough posts
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Yes, I could do a restore and I've thought about it. That's not a technical solution for fixing this problem though, just like you don't reinstall windows when your email isn't working.