How to workaround disk capacity restrictions on iPhone

[48check]

Have you ever gotten a notification that your iPhone disk capacity is almost full and you need to remove some files? You thought it was weird because you have more than 2 gigs left on your hard drive?

Well, that's because the iPhone mounts 2 drives in the filesystem namely:

/dev/disk0s1 <- this is where your Applications are stored.
/dev/disk0s2 <- this is where your Media files are stored (Videos, Songs)

disk0s1 has a Max Capacity of 315Megabytes while disk0s2 has a Max Capacity of 7.9 Gigabytes.

Here's a screenshot of my iPhone disk capacity.


Since most of the Applications we download from Installer are saved into disk0s1, chances are, it gets maxed out pretty quickly, hence, the notification "Your disk capacity is full etc.."

So now, how do we resolve this? The process shouldn't take more than 10 minutes if you are comfortable with using the terminal.

What this process does is it moves the Applications folder from disk0s1 to disk0s2 so we can use that 7.9 Gigabytes of space! (yipee, unlimited downloads). After it is moved to disk0s2, a "shortcut" to the applications folder is created so that it "tricks" the iPhone into thinking that it is still inside disk0s1.

Step by Step guide:

Step 1. Connect to your iPhone via Terminal
Step 2. Once connected, type the following: "cd /" (without the " of course)
Step 3. type "cp -rf Applications /private/var/Applications" (this step copies the Applications folder to disk0s2 like we described above). This may take 30-40 seconds depending on how big your applications folder is, be patient!
Step 4. Check if you were able to successfully copy the Applications folder in /private/var by typing the following:

Step 4.a "cd /private/var/" (without the ")
Step 4.b "ls" (without the ")

You should see something like this


Step 5. Once you have successfully copied the Applications folder, we now need to go back to the root folder. We do that by typing in "cd /"
Step 6. Now that we are back to the / folder, we need to delete the old Applications folder. We do this by typing "rm -rf Applications" NOTE: Make sure that you do steps #3 and #4 first
Step 7. This is the step where we create the "shortcut" by using the ln command. We now type the following: "ln -s /private/var/Applications Applications" (without the ")
Step 8. Now we can check if we were able to successfully crate a symlink (shortcut) by typing in: "ls -la"

You should see something like this.


Step 9. Navigate to /etc/fstab. Edit fstab using texteditor and remove the "noexec" string
Step 10. Overwrite the old fstab with the modified one.
Step 11. Reboot your iPhone.

You can now download as many applications as you want.

[ice_man]

tried this before macky. But wasn't successful. Will try it again.

[fatalresponse]

@48check
Cool. I actually learned a lot from this post. Will definitely try this out. Thanks!