Attention: My android posts will now be published on droidnova.com | Link to this article: Set up SD card for your android emulator

After reading a lot of blogs, tutorials, developer guides and miscellaneous stuff I started to wonder, if installing an application without the android market and without the sdk tools (ignore the emulator please ) is possible.

Some mailing list entries and blogs mentioned hacks to do so, but I couldn’t believe it. So whats the right thing to do in this case? Correct: lets try it!

The first thing I needed was an application to install so I took the one I created in my first tutorial: HelloAndroid.
I uploaded it on my web space, started the emulator and typed the URL of the apk in the browser. Android told me instantly that I need to install a SD card. Ok, never done that so far, so I looked and found a page about the emulator setup.
So I started creating a SD card image with the command line (could take some time…)
mksdcard 2048M sdcard.iso

Then I started the emulator with the parameter for the SD card image:
emulator -sdcard sdcard.iso

If you store your SD card image not in the same directory as the emulator start script, you need to add the path to the image like that:
emulator -sdcard /path/to/androidsdk/tools/sdcard.iso

Now I checked if the emulator has found my SD card. Done that with Menu -> Settings -> SD card & phone storage and read: 2040 MB total space on SD card was found.

After this setup I could easily download my apk-file from my websapce, install it and run it.

PS: A warning occurred as I tried it a second time but the warning was just to remind me this application was already installed and if I am sure to replace the existing with the new one.