Hack that iPhone and iTouch: Jailbreak, Hack and Unlock 3g iPhone and Apple Gadgets: Running out of disk space

(Windows XP / Vista) and (intel / PPC Mac)

With 1.1.2 firmware being the largest iPhone download to date, space is at a premium on the system partition of the iPhone's storage drive. Because of this, you might receive the following message if you like installing lots of programs via the Installer:

You can continue to install programs even after dismissing this message. You'll know when you've actually run out of space when you try to install something and it hangs at the installing status bar, the Installer crashes, and you get sent back to the SpringBoard.

Don't worry, you don't need to actually delete anything to free up some storage space. There's a better solution. What you need to do is essentially move your Applications directory contents from the system partition to the media partition (where if you have an 8 GB iPhone you have 7.2 GB of free space allotted to you). I only stumbled onto this process myself when I was sent a link to a forum discussion. I tried their method and it didn't work for me. I then found a guide over at ModMyiFone.com here, which I used to create this tutorial.

On your iPhone, press Home, Settings, General, Auto-Lock, then select Never. This will keep the iPhone from disconnecting the SSH connection while using the Terminal. Don't forget to set this back to 1 minute when you are done or your screen will never shut off, and your battery will run down very quickly.

Before we can continue, we need to know what IP address is being assigned to your iPhone by your router. Press the Home button, Settings, Wi-Fi, select the name of your network by pressing the blue arrow on the right, then look where it says IP Address. On my iPhone it is 10.0.1.4.

Download PuTTY here. Note that when typing in PuTTY, everything is case sensitive. So watch your capital letters and lower case letters. Do not interchange them, they won't work. Be careful to enter spaces where needed and watch your slashes /. Launch PuTTY. Enter your iPhone's IP address in the Host Name field, and then click Open.

In the window that opens, you'll be prompted with login as: Enter: root At the password prompt, enter your password. By default it is alpine Now enter the following commands: cp -R /Applications /var/root/ROOT_Applications Note it may take a minute or so before this process completes and the prompt symbol returns, allowing you to enter the next command. This command will copy all your applications to the /var/root/ROOT_Applications folder. rm -rf /Applications && ln -s /var/root/ROOT_Applications /Applications This command removes the /Applications folder and also creates a symbolic link (symlink) from /Applications to /var/root/ROOT_Applications. When the iPhone goes to access the /Applications folder, it is automatically forwarded to its new location at /var/root/ROOT_Applications. You can now close this program.

Restart the iPhone. Have fun installing more applications. If you should want to reverse this process, to remove the symlink, enter the following commands into the Terminal: rm /Applications

For those who are curious...

If you launch WinSCP you'll see only one subtle change in the directory structure. Note the Applications folder now has a shortcut arrow on the folder. If you click on it you'll go to its new location, however WinSCP fails to display the true path in /var/root//ROOT_Applications /Applications

In order to see that the symlink is working, you can enter these commands in PuTTY to verify it:

(intel / PPC Mac)

On your iPhone, press Home, Settings, General, Auto-Lock, then select Never. This will keep the iPhone from disconnecting the SSH connection while using the Terminal. Don't forget to set this back to 1 minute when you are done or your screen will never shut off, and your battery will run down very quickly.

Before we can continue, we need to know what IP address is being assigned to your iPhone by your router. Press the Home button, Settings, Wi-Fi, select the name of your network by pressing the blue arrow on the right, then look where it says IP Address. On my iPhone it is 10.0.1.4.

Go to your Applications folder and then go into the Utilities folder and find the program called Terminal. Note that when typing in the Terminal, everything is case sensitive. So watch your capital letters and lower case letters. Do not interchange them, they won't work. Be careful to enter spaces where needed and watch your slashes /.

In the Terminal enter the following: (insert your iPhone's IP address in the brackets as noted below, do not type the brackets)

Note it may take a minute or so before this process completes and the prompt symbol returns, allowing you to enter the next command. This command will copy all your applications to the /var/root/ROOT_Applications folder.

This command removes the /Applications folder and also creates a symbolic link (symlink) from /Applications to /var/root/ROOT_Applications. When the iPhone goes to access the /Applications folder, it is automatically forwarded to its new location at /var/root/ROOT_Applications.