MicroSD switching to 'read only' + microsd killer - Android General

I have, it seems, quite a big problem. Some weeks ago I noticed some anomalies: photos were not saved after taking them with the camera, swiftkey was sending me notification about the 'not possible to save personal predictions' and so on, and I could not access the pictures gallery: 'sd card mounted as storage' and then would quit to the home screen.
I noticed then with root explorer that the microsd was mounted as 'read only'. Ok, put it back to R/W and things worked again.....for a couple minutes. Then again, read only and the same story.
I put the card in a card reader, checked with windows for errors: impossible to repair the media (sorry I don't know the exact words in english, but that would be the chkdsk function). Ok.....worst solution: back up the things, format the card, put the things back on the card. Well:
1 - back up the things = impossible. I chose something like 800MB out of 32GB of the microsd....and it was copying at 5KB/s. Definitely not normal
2 - I managed to copy the necessary things. format the card = impossible. Normal format would begin, and then one millimiter before the progress bar goes to 100%, it says 'impossible to format the card'. If I choose 'fast format', it says it right away. If I use some other tool like HP usb tool, it says impossible to format.
GOOD. I thought the card was dead....so I bought a new one (a genuine Kingston, 32GB). Things were working properly. But yesterday exactly the same happened: camera not usable, gallery that doesn't show the pictures, swiftkey doesn't give me predictions.
I check with windows: same thing. Cannot repair errors, cannot format the card. BUT I can copy from it and write on it with normal speeds. The phone would still go to read only and make a mess making the whole system unusable.
A small note: a LONG time ago I did edit the boot filesystem, in a way that the system mounts the physical microsd card as 'mass storage internal memory' and the real internal memory (12GB, in the case of samsung note) as 'physical micro sd'. This was a 'fix' from XDA, to make all the market application install the data on the bigger partition (microsd) instead of the (quite small) 12 GB partition.
But I don't think it makes a difference. Photos and stuff are really on the physical 32GB microsd, and it is not working. Also the thing that I cannot format it from windows is very strange. And this is a new genuine card bought last week. What kind of sorcery is this? Can it be that the phone's card reader somehow damages the card itself ????

Related

Corrupted/invisible MicroSD card

Hi all,
I have a MicroSD card, which has been working fine before.
All of a sudden it stopped working, being not visible in card readers.
- Computers (XP/Vista) with an external card reader, show the drive letter for the reader, but just to tell me that there's nothing inside there.
- Several Windows Mobile 6 devices don't show the inserted card.
- Symbian S60 devices recognize the card as 'a card', telling me it's corrupted and ask me to format it. At an attempt to do so, it asks me if I want to continue, since other programs are using the card (which is not true). After saying "Yes, continue", nothing happens and the phone keeps saying the card is corrupted.
- On one Vista PC with a front panel card reader, the 'My Computer' window freezes when trying to open the drive, representing the front panel where the MicroSD card is in. Same for right clicking it in an attempt to format. When I take out the card, 'My Computer' instantly unfreezes.
It seems that that PC somehow 'sees' that the card is there (unlike the PC's where I use an external card reader for).
--
As you can see, a lot of different things, yet none of them offers me a way to format the card for use again.
Who has the solution here? Are there any magical tools/tips/tricks to save my card (a format would be no problem) or is it done for?
Thanks!
not that i know off many SD cards seem to die young
and the whole format was never made to last ages
which i guess is why sandisk made this
http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/20080718/sandisk-sd-worm-card/
if it'd under warrenty return it otherwise i'd sugest you flush it down the toilet

Raphael kills SD-Cards??

Hello everyone,
i own a Raphael since January and in this time it allready killed 2 SD-Cards.
The first one about 4 months ago.
Suddenly in the middle of usage the Raphael froze and i could not get it started again. even after a hardreset it was stuck in the bootscreen.
after a lot of trying and finally removing the sd card it bootet again without a problem.
the card was not readable anymore in any of my devices or windows boxes.
i thougth myself. well can happen even when a card is only half a year old got a new 8GB card and forgot about the incident.
yesterday while listening to some podcast suddenly the sound died. taking out the phone i found out it did not reacted to any power button presses or anything the screen stayed black.
after a softreset the phone worked again but took about 5 minutes to get in a usable state and the programms installed on the sd card where not aviable anymore.
taking a closer look i found that the card was not displayed in file explorer anymore.
gave it a try with my mp3 player. same result no card was found.
today in the morning i gave it a try on the pc with an sd-adabter. but also no result, wondows does not even recocnizes any device being plugged in. tryed a few data recover tools but non of them found the card.
someone has similiar experiances or any tips how i could get my data back from the card?
i guess the phone has to be send back for maintainance, but i doubt that they will find anything, if they accept it at all.
I have changed 4 sd cards because of similar problems. But the problem is most likely because of the fragility of high capacity microSDs, I wouldn't blame Raphael. Try other manufacturers (and try to find the ones that are not just rebranded)
I've had many issues with sd card corruption, but have solved some of the issues. Here's my advice (fwiw):
1. Get a card scanner, and regularly scan your catd. I do it everyday (takes 5 min). I use Wizcode Scandisk. It fixes errors and dumps out files that can be opened in notepad. It's worth looking at them, as it helped me find the multiple sources of corruption that I had.
2. Don't put your PIE cache on the card.
3. Change all 'save' paths (esp. the camera) to main memory.
4. Store any programs you use a lot on main memory.
5. Do NOT have any programs that run constantly on the sd card.
6. Do NOT put Fingerkeyboard on the sd card (major problem for me).
Basically, my advice is to use sd cards for storage. The Raphael has a lot of memory-use it for programs. I haven't had to format my card in about 4 months. I was doing it every couple of weeks for a while.
well basically i was using my sd card as a storage place for movies and podcast + podcastplayer prog.
and was using the player more or less the whole day.
i used the same card (and the other one before) also in my mp3 player when the raphael or the bt headset run out of power and there is no power outlet aviable to recharge. and twice the card failed in the rapahel.
when i got a new card, i also found that the card is working 100% on pc and mp3 player, but the raphael still can not see any sd card.
i really blame the phone and also assume that it now has a defective reader.
have to give it back to repairs as soon i have flashed the original firmware and make my way back to the store
You should scan the disk to find out the error sources. It may be something simple that causing them. Also, if your phone freezes when listening to music, you may want to either wait it out, or remove the card before soft resetting. You should do some searches on card corruption. There are lots of threads here that can be helpful.
many Sdcard and usbStick manufacturers got lowlevel format tools you can download and get cards not otherwise working in cardreaders on pc back to life
would love to get those cards working again. but i also would love to get the data back that was on them.
but the problem is the cards do not even appear on the pc, or any other device i have that can read/write them (usb card reader, digi cam, mp3 player)
its just as if nothing is ever inserted in the reader.
the low level format tools don't rely on windows driver model to detect cards
Flash Format (cnetx) has always been able to re-format my card, even when my pc couldn't recognize it and neither could my fuze. It has a free trial that works fine.
I haven't experienced any of these issues myself. But I'm sure I will now that I said that....
i gave that flash format a try, but it even failed to install. was one of those weird .exe installers. on the pc side it told me install was sucessfull, but on the ppc side was just a promt "installation failed".
a cab install would be nice, but without a working cardreader in the phone i guess would also not be of much help. i guess cuz of that that prog will not help me much. the reader in the phone is broken. cant read any cards, even brand new unused ones that are fine everywhere else just dont show up on the phone.
as for other "low level format tools" my search was quite unsecessful. i was looking at the sandisk and the transcend page (the suppliers of my 3 cards) but could not find anything.
google just found more request for this kind of program but not really somewhere where i could get it.
patlabor said:
i gave that flash format a try, but it even failed to install. was one of those weird .exe installers. on the pc side it told me install was sucessfull, but on the ppc side was just a promt "installation failed".
a cab install would be nice, but without a working cardreader in the phone i guess would also not be of much help. i guess cuz of that that prog will not help me much. the reader in the phone is broken. cant read any cards, even brand new unused ones that are fine everywhere else just dont show up on the phone.
as for other "low level format tools" my search was quite unsecessful. i was looking at the sandisk and the transcend page (the suppliers of my 3 cards) but could not find anything.
google just found more request for this kind of program but not really somewhere where i could get it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Check C:\Program Files\Microsoft ActiveSync\CNETX-you'll find the cab in there. There will be several-you want the PPC-Arm one. It should install fine.
Card Freeze
Yeah I had the same thing happen. Raphael would not boot unless I removed the card and as soon as I placed the card back into the sd slot it would lock up. Unlike you I was able to get on of my PCs (either the XP Pro or the Vista Pro) to recognize it but all I could do was format it.
OK I like the idea of moving all the data to the main however I'm an old Windows CE guy (yeah I had a Jornado) and the memory used to be shared between program and storage. The device would allocate from the other when more was needed. If I place all the stuff I want into the Raphael main memory won't that lower the amount of RAM I have for running programs or vice versa? I really don't know if the memory is fluid since all I get when I look into the memory is one listing total storage and one total program, there is no slider bar like there used to be in windows ce.
webfrm said:
Yeah I had the same thing happen. Raphael would not boot unless I removed the card and as soon as I placed the card back into the sd slot it would lock up. Unlike you I was able to get on of my PCs (either the XP Pro or the Vista Pro) to recognize it but all I could do was format it.
OK I like the idea of moving all the data to the main however I'm an old Windows CE guy (yeah I had a Jornado) and the memory used to be shared between program and storage. The device would allocate from the other when more was needed. If I place all the stuff I want into the Raphael main memory won't that lower the amount of RAM I have for running programs or vice versa? I really don't know if the memory is fluid since all I get when I look into the memory is one listing total storage and one total program, there is no slider bar like there used to be in windows ce.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The storage memory on the device is flash, not ram, so you don't lose program memory changing the save paths to main memory (if that's what you meant by moving data to main memory).
I never had any issues with my storage cards (sd and cf) on my 2003 device. I don't think it was the device, but rather the cards. The big, 16 gb cards just seem to be less hardy than a 1-2 gb card. I had all my apps on the storage card (including stuff like magic button), and never had a problem. But, jeez, the 16 g microsd is sensitive as hell. It gets minor bits of corruption at least once a week. I scan it everyday to avoid it crashing, which has helped, because I've gone 4 months without formatting it. One thing that I've found screws it up royally is doing a lot of file/directory operations over active sync on a pc. I don't know why, but cutting and pasting files from one folder to another in the sd card frequently results in lost clusters. Renaming folders is also a bad idea.
OK Flash
Well I guess I didn't explain it correctly. According to HTC the RAM is 288MB with a ROM of 512MB. So I'm really confused since according to the start>settings>system>memory the total for my storage and my program = 549MB which is of course more than 288 and 512. So when I load applications into my device and get a choice of main or storage card when it was a large file (some apps I use were 14 megs or more) I would choose the storage card.
My old experience with Windows CE was whatever memory was on the device was shared with both the program and storage, so I would put as much as possible on my storage card. However in windows 6.1 or higher it lists two separate columns for Program and Storage with: Total, In Use, and Free. So when I install apps I presumed they went into the storage area. Am I mistaken? I figured Program on the device meant how much is currently in use. Kinda like opening multiple windows on a PC. I notice it's low when at once I have 4 applications open on my windows mobile device so that's what I thought Program memory was.
Therefore does installing to the Main, when given a choice during program installation. where does it get installed ROM, RAM? Why is my total memory higher than RAM or the ROM
Any insight would help me decide the best location for my program installation to not corrupt the data, or have the flash card screw me up either.
288 MB is the total amount of system ram. A large amount is not user-accessible, it's used by the kernel/OS/Page-pool, so you don't see it reported. It's still there, though. The rom memory is 512 MB, but the actual memory in rom is subtracted by the storage memory so you see the amount of user-available memory. With 2003 devices, if the battery ran down, you lost all of your data, because the storage memory was in RAM (except perhaps for a little flash disk space). But with a fuze, you can pull the battery out, and not lose your data.
Totally confused
OK your right about the 2003 devices which is why I placed most of my stuff on a storage card. However why is my total reported memory 549MB more than the 512 ROM? Also when I install stuff to the device where does it get stored, the 512 ROM? Are you saying that the 200mb of Program being shown is 288 RAM minus the 88 being used to run the OS?
So are you saying its safe to install all my apps onto the device and I won't lose anything if the battery runs out?
Yeah, I've been saying that for about 3 weeks, lol! They got rid of the volatile storage memory with winmo 5; we're onto 6.5 now, and it's a thing of the distant past. I you don't believe me, pull out your battery (there's no backup battery on the device) and see if it causes a hard reset.
This is not an uncommon problem with digital cameras, as well. It's complicated, but the bottom line is this: whenever you buy an SD/micro SDHC/etc. card, you should do a full format of it on your COMPUTER, then put it in your device.

[Q]Slow/unstable SD card, fix?

I have 2 Desire phones here. One seems to have a pretty unstable sd card.
I copied the same file to both phones (first over cable, then over wifi). I have made a print screen of the network speed graph. It's clear that the first phone has some trouble with placing the file on the sd card. The 2nd phone only 'glitched' when the phone turned the screen off (near the end).
Is there anything I can do for the first sd card, or should I buy a new one?
Thanks,
Bart.
Scan the card for errors, and see if that works. You can also try to fix bad sectors. If worse comes to worse, format the card.
How would you suggest I scan the card? Android app or windows? Fix bad sectors with chkdsk in windows?
There's probably an app, but the easiest way is to just do it with a PC if you have a card reader or can access the card on your pc via a mass storage option. Right click on the drive (E:, or whatever), then select properties-->tools--->error checking and then scan it for errors. If the card is corrupted, it will be fixed.
Possible fix
try this: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=18971539
but not sure if this is the case

[Q] Cannot delete or add to SD card

A few days ago, I tried taking some pictures with my Droid Charge and the pics would not save. I tried in the stock camera app and in CameraZoom EX. CameraZoom gave me an error message "failed to save photo to SD car (error code=2). I figured I was out of space.
My Titanium Backup scheduled backup did not run the next day. So, I assumed I was out of space.
I connected the phone to my PC and deleted some pics and music. WHen I was in WIndows explorer, it said I had about 2 GB free after doing all of this.
When playing music today, I noticed files that I had deleted before still present on the phone. I thought this was weird. I went back and checked and all the stuff I thought I deleted was still there.
I searched on the CameraZoom EX error code 2. It directed to remove and reinsert the card and reboot. I tried that. I have tried unmounting and then mounting with no success either.
My phone seems to be working fine, but I cannot delete or add anything to the microSD card (the original that came with the phone). It does not matter if I use my WIndows 7 laptop, desktop, or various file managers on the phone itself.
ANy idea what is going on?
To me, it sounds like the SD card is going bad. Not a common occurrence but it can happen. You're lucky you can still read from it... I would suggest getting a new SD card (Verizon might even give you a new one free) and copying your data to it before sectors start going bad. By the way, how did you manage to full up 32 gb?
Or I could be blowing this out of proportion and it's just a matter of write protection on the card.
Sent from my SCH-I510 using xda premium
Another option is to copy everything off the SD card, format it, and try to write everything back. Sometimes a format can joggle a bugged card.
It is mostly music that I have on there. I am not sure how write protection would have gotten on the microSD card or how I would remove it. It does not have a physical togge like an SD card does.
I think I may have to try re-formatting. Ugh.
It is mostly music that I have on there. I am not sure how write protection would have gotten on the microSD card or how I would remove it. It does not have a physical togge like an SD card does.
I think I may have to try re-formatting. Ugh.
Corrupted SD card. Call VZW and be nice on the phone, explain the situation, hopefully they send you a new one.
Hmmm, this is interesting. I cannot even format the microSD card. I tried to do it through Windows Explorer. It looked like it worked. I then tried to copy files back on and it choked halfway through on a movie, I think.
Anyway, what was more interesting is that when I looked at the drive again, everything was back where it originally was. So, the re-formatting must not have actually worked.
I then tried to erase the SD through the options in Android. I unmounted. I then selected Erase SD card. After rebooting (to just be safe), the SD card still is untouched.
THis microSD card has become an impenetrable force. More realistically, it must have write-protection enabled somehow as that is the only thing I can think of.
The question is how do I find out if write protection is enabled and how to disable it? Any ideas are appreciated. Thanks.

Obnoxious Problem with SDXC Card - Card on Computer Works Fine, Phone Wants to Format

Card is a Sandisk 128GB Ultra MicroSDXC A1 card.
Card is formatted exFAT.
Card can be mounted, opened, and read/write with no problems via my laptop when plugged directly (SD slot).
Android (LG G5, LineageOS 15.1) says card is corrupt, is trying to make me format. Card initially set up as "Portable Storage".
Took FOREVER to move music onto this card, as artists had to be moved one at a time or transfers would fail, so I'm trying to avoid formatting.
I've tried rebooting the phone, repairing the file system using TWRP Wipe command (fails with error code 1), and mounting with a clean eject via Windows 10 on my laptop using the SD card slot. Nothing has made an impact, stupid phone still won't allow me to use the card.
If anyone has any ideas why this is happening, or how I could potentially fix this without having to wipe the card, I would appreciate it. This thing has been a PITA since I got it, I thought it would be awesome having such expandable storage on my phone (I'm a weirdo who doesn't use streaming services) but I've had nothing but problems so far. I have to be careful with how I transfer files onto the card or the transfer will take an (appropriately) long time, act like it works, but then the file just won't be there. Now I've finally gotten the card loaded up, and after a routine phone reboot a few days ago, the Android OS is trying to say it's corrupt; This is also making me worry that this will continue being an issue in the future.
Running "chkdsk E: /r" on my laptop is revealing a couple minor corruptions inside the directory, and volume bitmap. It's hanging on verification/completing now.
Is it possible that I have a bad SD card? This thing has seriously done nothing but suck since I've been trying to use it.
Edit: Unless someone tells me otherwise, I'm pretty sure this is a bogus/defective SD card. I simply cannot believe that flash memory would perform this badly. I'm going to return this card (bit of a PITA since I ordered it online) and buy another one locally.

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