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My phone is rooted with aokp build 38 on it. It is a Verizon Galaxy Nexus (toro)

There is a folder /sdcard/data that I can't make any changes to. Some of my apps are trying to use this folder but are not able to because any changes to this folder fail.

I tried deleting it but was unable to. I even used adb shell with root access and tried to rmdir, but it says "Permission Denied"

I also tried to chmod 777 to give full access to the folder, but I still was unable to make any changes to it.

I'm at a loss as of what to do to make this directory writeable again.

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2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Make a backup of your data first.

every folder and file in the /sdcard/data directory is 0 bytes.

This looks like a corrupted filesystem or a defective sdcard (see correction). Especially, folders have a usual minimum size of 4.0K.

I'd suggest you to back up your data first, then check for errors:

Does "dmesg" show filesystem errors on mmcblk0 or similar?

If so try to backup, reformat sdcard (see correction) and restore or replace the faulty sdcard.

(EDIT) Correction:
The Galaxy Nexus has no SDCard but a unified EXT4 filesystem for /data that also includes /sdcard (which is symlinked to /data/media). You might solve the problem with a wipe. But that will also delete all of your /sdcard content too.

You might have luck entering recovery and adb'ing into it to fsck.ext4 your /data partition, I'm however not sure if your rom supports this command

# boot to recovery first!
adb shell
cat /proc/partitions
# look for the biggest one and replace the ?? accordingly
fsck.ext4 /dev/block/mmcblk???

Here's an external report about a similar issue:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1541379

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How do I get adb to recognize my device when it's in recovery? It always says device not found. (I feel like it should just see it, but maybe I'm wrong.) – Aaron Smith Jun 18 '12 at 12:40
Some recoveries don't start adb internally but offer an option to do so in the menu. If adb is missing altogether you can start a different recovery temporarily: download a recovery image from clockworkmod.com/rommanager and boot to fastboot mode. Then execute 'fastboot boot <recovery-...img>' Adb should work until the next reboot then – ce4 Jun 18 '12 at 13:22
I ended up just restoring to stock. I'll reflash a custom ROM later. I couldn't get my computer to recognize the phone when I was in recovery. I believe your answer was correct though so I'll mark it as such. – Aaron Smith Jun 18 '12 at 18:09
up vote 0 down vote

Try going to /data/media, it should be the same folder as /sdcard. I think the files you're trying to delete might be virtual, I had this exact problem while trying to clean up in /sdcard/Android/data until I realized that I could also find them at the path specified.

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what are 'virtual' files on a vfat/ext4 partition? the 0-byte sizes of folders are a rather clear indication of fs problems, most probably some directory inode is not accessible/parseable and gets stuck at 0 byte.# – ce4 Jun 25 '12 at 22:12

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