Updating US Cellular Galaxy S4 w/ Vanir ROM

My wife’s phone was having some space issues that I finally got around to looking at today.  I recently upgraded my S5 to a 32GB SD card and it gave me plenty of space, so I was surprised when I checked hers and saw that it already had a 32GB card.  Had I looked a little closer, I probably would have realized that the card itself was not full, and in fact barely had anything on it.  I didn’t even have it set to store pictures on the external card :/

Having already bought a 128GB Class 10/U1 card, I decided to go ahead and install it.  I had run across an app a while back that actually allows the apps to be linked over to the SD card, so they don’t jump back to main memory every time they update, which is annoying as hell. I deleted the partition table on the SD card (referenced http://superuser.com/questions/373463/how-to-access-an-sd-card-from-a-virtual-machine, specifically answer 5 for a Windows machine… after updating VirtualBox and installing the current version of extensions, I was actually able to recognize and pass through my USB to SD adapter to my Linux guest) and recreated with a 96GB FAT32 partition and a 32GB ext4 partition (great thread on this setup here), formatted both appropriately, copied the data over from the old 32GB card to the FAT32 partition in the new card, installed, and booted.

I then configured the camera to save new pictures to the external SD card (FAT32 partition) and installed the Link2SD application from the Play store.  Had some difficulty figuring out why I couldn’t get root on the Vanir ROM, tried installing a couple of the SU apps with no luck.  Turned out I had not enabled it by 8x tapping the build number in about phone, and then apparently you have to select a different option in the “enable root” developer option… even though it shows apps + ADB, apparently it doesn’t set it.  Once I set it to apps only, I was prompted for root authorization as I had expected.

I then linked several apps over to the SD card, which seemed to be pretty straightforward and to work well.  Assuming this fix holds and continues to work as expected through updates, etc., I should have this phone pretty well fixed up for its usable lifetime.