How to Remove Second Partition of Your SD Card?

Partitioning an sd-card is a process of dividing your sd-card into two or more partitions or storage locations. In my previous article, ‘How to Partition an SD Card and Install Dark Tremor A2SD Script?’, I explained how you can create a second partition on your sd-card and then use dark tremor apps2sd script to install all your applications to sd-ext partition by default. In this article I will explain you how you can remove the partition that you created on your sd-card.

Either you want to revert to the original state of your SD card –to the state it was when you bought it—or want to partition your SD card again because you want to increase or decrease the size of sd-ext partition you created, there will always be the necessity to remove your existing ext3/4 partition. In this article you will learn how to remove the second partition (aka sd-ext partition) from your sd-card.

Remember playing with your SD card –such as partitioning, editing, deleting, etc—will delete all the data stored on your SD card including that of sd-ext partition. So, you are suggested to do a nandroid backup of your rom as well as to backup (copy) all the data of your sd-card to your computer or any other storage media. I am in no way responsible for the loss of data you incur because of your carelessness. If you follow the instructions carefully, you won’t have to incur any loss of data.

We are going to use a free utility named MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition 7.0 for the purpose of creating and removing partitions. If you don’t have this on your personal computer then you can download it from here and install it on your PC. You can also use any other partition manager that you are familiar with according to your ease of use and convenience. This utility software is very small in size and is available for free, so I chose this over other partition manager.  You can find a complete documentation of the software at http://www.partitionwizard.com/help/about-partition-wizard.html.

Removing the second partition (aka sd-ext partition) from your sd-card:

1. Backup all your data of SD card. Either, copy the data to your computer or any other secure storage media.

2. If you haven’t done it already, Download MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition and Install it on your PC.

3. Move all your data including apps and dalvik cache stored in your sd-ext partition to your internal memory. Use APPS2SDGUI app or run these commands in terminal emulator.

su

a2sd nocache

a2sd remove

4. Now, mount your SD card to our PC, with the help of USB or card reader.

5. Run ‘MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition’ application. Go to Start>>All Programs>>MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition>> MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition to run the app.

6. Now see the Disk 2 part on the application. This is our SD card. You can match your SD card’s size with the Disk 2’s size to be sure. Also, don’t touch the Disk 1 part. It is your system’s Hard Disk and messing with it will cause serious damage to your PC. Please look at the image below:

See the Disk 2 Part in the App. We will modify this to remove our sd-ext partition.

7. In the Disk 2 part (or your SD card’s partition), note the file system of two partitions. One should be FAT32 and other will be Ext 3 or Ext 4 depending upon your sd-ext’s File System.

8. Delete the partition whose File System is Ext 3/Ext 4.  Right Click on the Partition and then choose Delete. See image below:

Remove Ext 4/3 Partition by Right Clicking it and Selecting Delete.

9. Now select the FAT32 partition, Right Click on it and choose Move/Resize. You will get something like as the image below. Drag the right arrow (see picture below) to the end and fill the grey background.

Use the Deleted Memory to Resize your SD Card Partition and increase it's size.

 

10. Note the Final Output. You are only left with one partition on your Disk 2 and that is of FAT 32 File system. You have successfully removed your partition from the sd-card.

11. All you have to do now is Click on Apply button at the standard toolbar and wait for it to apply all the changes. See the image below:

CLick Apply and you are done. Your second partition is removed and the remaining unallocated memory is merged to the sd-card (FAT 32) Partition.

That’s it. If you want to create a new partition on it either use the software or use clockwork mod recovery to create a sd-ext partition on your sd-card. Now copy back the contents, you copied earlier to your PC, to your SD Card and you are ready to go. If you have any problem, feel free to ask for help at the comments below. Also, Please use your real name while commenting, Anonymous comments are marked as spam and thus are not replied.