PreCentral: Workaround for Application Database is Full error

[News Reporter]

This tip should work on any devices running webOS 2.0 and higher

If you have been a victim of the "Application database is full" error on your webOS device, you know what a devastating issue this can be. If you have not seen this error, consider yourself lucky. The "application database" that is referenced here is not the

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on your device, but rather the internal database that was introduced in webOS 2.0 that manages a lot of data on your device. And if it gets full, there is no place to store any more data. You may get some advance warnings that will tell you to try deleting calendar entries, and even trying remove music, movies or documents from your USB drive, but most likely none of that will work and you will eventually be alerted that the database is full and you need to restart your device. And unfortunately, it doesn't make it clear that it will essentially perform an "erase apps and data" and log you out of your profile, requiring you to reactivate your device and log back in, also losing your application data and settings.  And to add insult to injury, you may log back in to your profile and still get that error once you activate it again.

Although there is no official fix from Palm/HP on this, you can always count on the homebrew community to get your back. In this case, it's Donald Kirker, webOS developer and former Intern for both HP and Palm. The problem stems from the fact that the internal partition that the database is saved to is only 135 MB big so it doesn't take a lot of data to fill this up. Donald's solution is to increase this partition by reducing the space available on the USB drive. To ensure that you don't run into this issue again, we will show you how you can extend this partition by 512 MB, but you can adjust that number up or down as needed. But be warned, you are messing around the underlying Operating System here and can cause some major problems on your device if something goes awry . You will also need to have Novacom installed on your computer and be familiar with using the Command Line. If you don’t have the webOS SDK installed on your computer to access the command line, you can always use webOS Quick Install and select "Tools" and then "Linux Commandline" to get access to it. Note that this is has only been tested on a Pre3 (including by this writer), but should work on any webOS 2.x device and possibly the TouchPad. However, before performing any actions, , both on your USB as well as any application data by using .