Kyros MID 8042 sd card problems

[AlexNetherton]

I got a Coby Kyros MID 8042 for Christmas, and I have enjoyed it tremendously. I realized that it did not have Google Play Store on it, and Getjar was pretty lame (did not at the time have any of the Angry Birds games! NOOOOOO!), so went the route of "sideloading", where I copied the backups of APK's off my Android phone and installed them by copying them to my Windows PC, then transferring to the tablet (slow and mind numbing). Finally, found that I could download Amazon's App Store from Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more and find some of the nice stuff, and then found 1Mobile Market at 1mobile.com and found many more apps and games. Google Voice Search is a problem though. Much searching for the .apk.
However, my real problem is that my tablet has 2GB of internal memory, and somehow does not recognize the SD card. It says it is mounted, but anything you put on there is lost; the tablet does not "see" it.
Looks like I need to do some research. I try to move apps to the SD card, but the SD only shows 2GB, and I run out of space. However, the card installed is a 16 GB. Why does my tab show 2GB of internal storage, and 2GB of SD card? I can even remove the SD card, and it still shows 2GB of internal, and 2GB of SD card!
I have done a factory wipe and reset a couple of times, and it is the same, even wiped the SD card.
I am reluctant to root, as I sometimes have a dyslexic episode, and bricking would be a real possibility.
Hope someone has an idea...
Alex

 

[Traveller]

You have two storage spaces: /mnt/sdcard and /mnt/extsd. Anything related to the apps you download is found on /mnt/sdcard, which is only 2GB in size, with about a quarter of that reserved for .android-secure. /mnt/extsd is your MicroSD card and your music and movies are stored on there. This dual memory space structure is a change from Gingerbread and prior, which stored all the information on the MicroSD card.

There is a way to change this behavior, but it involves both rooting the tablet and editing critical system files.