When the Galaxy S7 was announced last month at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, one of the main issues that a lot of hardcore users had with the device was the lack of adoptable storage – the LG G5 also decided to leave it out. Now when you think about it, this was to protect their customers. Samsung knows that a lot of their users take their microSD card out and use it in other devices quite often. Which there’s no problem with that, until you use adoptable storage. By taking out the microSD card and using it in other devices, you run the risk of corrupting the data on that SD card. Hence why Samsung decided to axe adoptable storage, likely the same reason for LG axing it too.
However, a few developers have figured out a way around this. Paul O’Brien is here with a way to get adoptable storage without rooting your device. You’ll just need some time and a bit of knowledge of ADB. First up, you’ll want to back up the data on that microSD card, obviously you’ll be formatting the microSD card in this tutorial, so always important to back up the data.
Now you’ll want to commit to how much you want to make adoptable. You can choose the entire microSD card or just a portion of it. Now what you’ll need to do is open up a command window on your computer (preferably in a folder that has ADB and fastboot files). To get started, you’re going to type the command “adb shell”. Now you’ll also need to plug your phone in and enable USB Debugging from within the developer settings. Then you’ll type in “sm list-disks”. This will show you the disks that are available for adoption. Now you’ll see a disk with an ID, in O’Brien’s example it was “disk:179:160”. So the command you’ll want to execute is “sm partition disk:179:160 private”. If you want to adopt just half of the microSD card, it’ll be “sm partition disk:179:160 mixed 50”. It’s important to note that once you do this commend, it’s going to take a while to finish up. When it’s done you’ll see the new storage capacity in the settings.
Pretty simple, and nice to see that it doesn’t require any rooting. So now, you can have a 128GB Galaxy S7 with only a 32GB model (well not completely, but you can add 128GB and make it a 160GB model).