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Warning: You are running out of disk space

Weren’t you surprised the first time you read that warning? Worse still you know you only have a few small photos and not a single video in your iPod touch. Yet your iPod touch is already running out of disk space. WTF?

To keep a long story short, Apple split the iPod touch’s flash drive into two partitions. The first partition named “iPhone Root FileSystem” (yes, iPhone… even though that’s an iPod) is about 300mb in size. It is, as the name implies, where Apple installed iPod touch’s mini “OS X” in. The second partition, “Root’s Home”, stores all your media and misc files. Its size is the capacity of your iPod touch (8GB or 16GB) minus the 300MB allocated to the first partition.

The low disk space warning is on the first partition as you add more and more apps to your jailbroken iPod touch. To overcome this problem, we can move the /Applications folder to the second partition. Doing so frees up about 40MB. But that’s not the best part. After moving, you can theoretically install every iPod touch apps available to be brim and still never experience low disk space again.

Let’s move it. There are two methods:

Hard:

Easy:

  1. Use the BossTool by Big Boss. You can find it in the Installer, under the “Utilities” category. The Installer source for Big Boss’ apps is as follows:
    http://www.sleepers.net/~iphone/repo.xml
    Check your typing. The URL is cAsE sensitive. “/~iphone/” and “.xml” must be in small letters only.
  2. Launch BossTool and tap on “Free Disk Space”.
  3. Follow its instructions to move your Apps and Wallpapers (we don’t have Ringtones in the iPod). If you’re not comfortable about moving your Apps, then move just the Wallpaper. This should buy you some time until you run out of space again in future.
  4. Unless you like the other functions of BossTool, you can uninstall it after it has done its job. You’ll only need it again the next time you Recover your iPod touch.

38 Comments

  1. the big boss aplicatio is not on the installer ewhat should i do? ._.

  2. Hi Rupert: After using BigBoss to “move” my apps and wallpapers to the Root’sHome partition,I went back in with AFPd to have a look at the changes. I found that the Applications folder was still in the FileSystem partition but that somehow I had almost 50MB free (as compared to 9Mb before the move). I expected to find just an alias for the Apps folder. However, Get Info says it is real and has 31.7 Mb of stuff in it. Where did the free space come from?

  3. thank yuo very much for your help i couldnt do this whitout your help really i have no words just you are the Men, and thanks to you a lot of people can do a nice thing of their ipods and learn somethings, again thank you.

    PD. my english is not very well because i live on mexico but am learning sorry for the grammar gomen and again thanki yuo

  4. Roksob, that’s the magic of Symbolic Link. Perhaps you’re more familiar with Mac OS X’s alias? Symbolic Link is Unix’s own alias. The old Application folder you see is a fake. It’s really just a file that *points* to the new Application folder. The alias-ed folder takes up just a few kilobytes of disk space. So even though you see two Application folders, only one is real and taking up disk space.

    It’s precisely because it looks and act like the real thing we can use this trick to fool the iPod into thinking everything isn’t changed even though we have actually moved the Application folder to another partition. Haha.

  5. Pablo, the pleasure’s all mine!

  6. This was great! Great writeup, was finished in under 4 minutes. Thanks a lot!

  7. So when I put on applications, do I put them in the original folder (the small one), or do I put them to where I transferred all my files?

  8. reicc, you’ll put them in the new one. After that, they will show up in the old one as well. Read my comment to Roksob dated Dec 31 to find out why it is so.

  9. This sounds great! But I can’t seem to find BigBoss in the Installer! What should I do? I think I have the same problem as pablo.

  10. Alex, I’m sure you added the source to BigBoss’ repository. But I’m guessing you typed it in wrongly. The URL is cAsE sensitive, and your iPod probably changed it to “/~iPhone”. Delete the bad entry, and add it again, carefully.

    A tip for everybody: Sources are listed in the Installer with their names. If a Source is named “Untitled”, it’s a bad one with an invalid URL. You’ll want to delete that source.

  11. oh, sorry to bother you again rupert, but how do i type the “~” on my iPod?

  12. Alex, tap on “123” and you’ll see “#+=” on top of it. It’s there in, above comma. 😛

  13. rupert you are awesome. thanks for everything!

  14. Hi Rupert. I went to this website, but I got this page with junk info with “Untitled”. Do you have any suggestions?

  15. Hi Anne

    Do you mean this website?

    http://www.sleepers.net/~iphone/repo.xml

    You don’t surf to it. You add the url address to your iPod touch’s Installer, as a new “Source”. The Source option is to the right of “Uninstall”.

    • How do u Add bosstool to iPod installer?

  16. IT WORKS!!! 😀

  17. Hi Rupert. Thanks for the tip. That really worked flawlessly. 🙂

  18. rupert i have a problem i was trying to install the boss tool and it wasnt,i allready instal the source. I hope you cantona help me

  19. got it was only a actualization tnx this is mi first post on the ipod thankyou

  20. THANKS!

    I was looking for an app that did this but every site I came accross involved SSH and terminal.

    Cheers

  21. Is there a way to undo this process? I followed the instructions and when I connected my iPod in iTunes there was no “orange” space at all. This was great, but recently my Guitar Hero hasn’t been working that well. Some bands I click on will work but for most it just crashes. Do you think the moving of the applications has anything to do with this? Any suggestions?

  22. COuld be because of where music is stored

  23. @Cory:

    The path to find music in Guitar Hero is specifically to go from one position on the iPod to another (ie, from the Guitar Hero app to where music is stored). Since you changed one of the elements, ie the starting point of that path, the path needs to be changed as well. If you know how to do that, go for it. Otherwise, I suggest you put the Guitar hero app back where it was (you can still leave the rest there).

  24. Can you enlighten me as to what folder it used to be in and the path to it? (Its technically TTR with the Guitar Hero theme, just so you know)

  25. Um, I have no idea what the path used to be, or where it would be now. But that’s the solution. (I myself never use TTR.)

  26. How about changing the path? Does anybody know how to do that?

  27. If you go to Root File System > Applications and right-click Show Package contents, ten Contents > Resources, there should be a .plist file somewhere that determines the file path. Just change that and you’re good.

  28. Hi, im kinda new here n am running out of space… so i was happy to hear about this boss tool but, as soon as i “relocate my fonts> ringtones > apps, none of my aps workin even the dialer… so thought it just needed a good restrart but after i tunred it on, now it only beeps with the apple screen and loading image… and nothing else… any help?

  29. nvm got it looked at another forum n 1 noticed tryin to restore from i tunes (restart pc n keep tryin until it works) in my case 3 times =/ then instal restore 1.1.4 n unlocked with i liberty… ^^ yay !!! nomore boss tool for me i learned my lesson hahaha… the hr way… -.-!

  30. Can’t find it. Can you undo the process that the bosstool did?

  31. You’d have to undo the symlinks that are made. I dunno how to do that

  32. thanks friend it is so great. It worked fine for me. Thanks a lot once again.hurray

  33. Woah i have 137mb/300 free now, awesome!

  34. Does this work ipod touch firmware 4.2.1?
    ^(BossTools)^

  35. It keeps on saying that I’m not able to do it

  36. It keeps on telling me its not valid

  37. Thanks to all of you for this website,


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