tablet with three drives --- two internal and one external

[3dsbrock]

Last year I purchased the "New 7" Capacitive A10 Android 4.0 8GB 512MB Tablet PC" off of ebay. I like the tablet very much. I've got a problem, though. This tablet is showing two internal drives...one is called "internal storage (about 1 GB), and the other is called an internal sd card (about 5.5 GB). This is giving me some problems. I can't get apps to the external sd card. If I select "move to sd card" under the app's information, it just gets shifted to the internal sd card. Even when I've connected the tablet and the external sd to a computer and manually moved app folders to the external sd, I have been unable to get the tablet to look to the external sd for the app info when I try to run the app. Any suggestions?

 

[B. Diddy]

It's acting like an Android phone, which typically has a partition for Application Storage where apps are installed (which I think is the 1 GB you refer to as internal storage), and another partition called Internal Storage (which the system "sees" as a kind of unremovable SD card, and which I think is being called "Internal SD Card" on your device). With unrooted Android phones, when you move an app to SD, you're actually moving a large part of the app to the Internal Storage, although some of the key parts of the app stay behind in Application Storage. If you're not rooted, you cannot move apps to the external SD card--this makes sense, because if you remove the SD card or if it becomes unseated from dropping the device, then the app would likely fail and possibly make the system unstable.

The external SD card is primarily for things like media files (music, video, photos). A lot of apps can also take advantage of the external SD to store non-critical data.

 

[3dsbrock]

Thank you for explaining that. But, what do you mean by "rooted" and "unrooted"?

 

[B. Diddy]

Rooting is the process of gaining more complete control over your Android operating system--it comes from the term "root access." It makes Android even more flexible that it already is--you can do delete preinstalled apps, drastically change the appearance of menus and fonts, tinker with the hardware to make the CPU run even faster than it normally does, etc. As you can probably guess, it's not for beginners, and if you aren't careful, you can irreversibly damage your device. It typically also voids the device's warranty.

 

[3dsbrock]

I appreciate the knowledge. Thank you