Note 20 ultra Disappearing video, unrecognizable file type.. and more crazy things. HELP! - Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra Questions & Answers

So last week the tornadoes hit my hometown in Western Kentucky. If you watch TV, then you have seen it. 75% of the town is wiped out.. I have (should I say had) amazing video from that along with the destruction, the fear, there aren't really words for it all.. several friends are having issues with insurance and looting. I'm hoping some of their belongings are on my videos so police can prosecute the looters. (Totally not cool to steal from people who just lost everything.) Here's my dilemma
A couple days prior I changed My settings in my phone to record straight to sd card so I didn't have to move files to it. It's a SDHC. 1024GB MICRO SD. It was formatted because I've been using it for a while... just moving photos over to it from my gallery, no problem. Later that day I went to show the video and when I opened gallery I watched every video I had disappear and be replaced with the grey box and white exclamation. Photos I took are fine... eventually it has now greyed out 95% of my video.
I've tried playing on pc, with vlc, media player, Samsung video player, "unrecognizable file format " They are mp4. Here's what I noticed interesting.
I checked the SD card and it says healthy, no bad sectors.
The time length on each video says 0.00
The size of the file is different from the size shown in my explorer on my phone, pc, and what's shown by a file explorer/recovery program
I changed my settings back to record to the internal memory but still nothing.
I'm guessing headers or something didn't transfer or or hell who knows
I've changed the file extension and name. Nothing
I've tried converting but the file type isn't recognized.
Help! Here's photos of what I see

The last time I saw something like this, there was an issue with the card, not the phone. That doesn't necessarily mean that's your issue. But it's highly probably.

I agree it's the most likely scenario. Best thing to do is take a few similar test videos and replicate what you did on a new or different microsd card and see how it turns out. If it works and retains it then it's the original card. If not then it's an issue with the phone/ hardware itself.

I actually ended up copying the card and put it back in... the recordings I made next were fine! No settings were changed, and it's only the one Day they messed up... could it be because there was zero cell signal in town? Nothing could upload to the cloud.... I know moving files or even recording straight to sd will leave file pieces and signal most definitely should not affect storage on a device. I did get this data off one video though. Any ideas?

I've never heard of a data connection messing with storage of a device unless that device is separate and not directly connected. Again, doesn't mean it can't happen. But the most likely problem is still the card. You said you copied everything back on, what is happening to new content?

Related

[Q] Can't see files on internal SD from PC?

Has anyone experienced this?
I was looking last night to figure out where the space had gone on my internal "SD". I have a Videos folder that I copy things onto to watch at work that appeared to be empty, which was great, but then I got low space warnings when copying things to that folder, which was not so good.
I looked around, trying to figure out what was eating so much of my memory (this is all done via my Win 7 PC over USB) and couldn't see anything that was that big. I looked in a Pictures folder that I know contains pictures of my kids and wife that I keep separate from my camera pics and that's when I knew there was something up. It didn't show any files. Weird.
Root Explorer shows the files just fine (the Videos folder contained 1 season of a British Comedy and 5 stand-up comedy videos).
Not a huge deal, but I'm wondering if anyone has run into this before. I never saw this happen prior to restoring to stock a few weeks ago (now on Slim Bean 3.1). Maybe someone else has had this happen and knows a fix (or maybe it's the precursor to the phones memory failing, which I'd really like to know ASAP cause it's still under warranty). Like I said, not a big deal right now as I can still access the files with Root Explorer, but I've never heard of this happening (heard of it happening the other way, though).
Phone is connected via MTP, not as USB Mass Storage. Have not tried it in any other mode yet (and won't be able to until I get home from work).
ive ran into alot of ddifferent time on my phone ive noticed that the drain normally isnt your files you put on the internal its more of the Games and stuff which we dont tend to notice and back uo and restores. when my pc wouldnt find the files i downloaded a app called USB switcher what i did was toggle it from whatever mode i was already in MTP to UMS vice versa and it started shwoing me the files i dont know anything about it being hardware failure or not but maybe this might help

Corrupted MP4s on microSD causing random reboots

I have had a 64GB stock TF700T and dock for over a year now and other than having a digitizer replaced under warranty, it has been relatively trouble-free – I‘m one of those lucky owners not having severe lag problems, etc. But recently it started rebooting randomly several times a day, even occurring when in sleep mode. I tried a number of different things to isolate the issue but the only thing that appeared to work was removing and leaving out the 64GB SanDisk microSD card. It was formatted exFAT so I copied the files off of it and reformatted it as NTFS and copied the files back to it and put it back in. Still got reboots. That’s when I noticed that the PC copies of two of the mp4 videos I copied back on to it did not show picture-based thumbnails and when I tried to play them, media player said there was a problem with them. I deleted them from the microSD card and now, 40 hours later, I have yet to see a reboot. I can’t prove it, but I think the files were originally corrupted when copied from my PC to the card in the tablet.
Anyone see similar problems?
Dave
A follow-up: This seemed to only reduce the frequency of reboots, not eliminate them. I came across some discussions from the Sept timeframe regarding reboots associated with Chrome Beta, which I had installed recently. I uninstalled this and have now been running for 70 hours without an issue.

[Q] z3 deleted files & renamed folders on SD

Hi all
Today i took my Samsung 64GB SD card out of my Samsung Note Pro 12.2 (after unmounting the card first of course!) and put it in my Xperia Z3, but upon viewing the contents of the card I see that 99% of the photos, videos and music that was on there has been deleted. The card shows as having 59.9GB free space. The data that I have lost totals roughly 40GB.
Also, the folder names have been altered, for example "music" has become "music.7" and "photo" has become "photo.3".
Can anyone explain why this may have happened, and if there is a way of recovering the data?
Since the data loss i havent used the card, aside from putting it back in the Note Pro 12.2 in the hope that the data would show on this device. It didnt.
I would be gutted if there is no way of retrieving my family photos and videos.
And yes, i know I you'll all say i should have backed up, but funnily enough I took the card out of the Note Pro 12.2 to begin doing just that! how ironic.
If it didn't work in the z3 I'd have put it back in the note to retrace my steps. Files don't just disappear without cause. I always turn my device off when I pull the card. Plus being that it's "android", could there be a (godforbid) sync issue?
tweker said:
If it didn't work in the z3 I'd have put it back in the note to retrace my steps. Files don't just disappear without cause. I always turn my device off when I pull the card. Plus being that it's "android", could there be a (godforbid) sync issue?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
hmm, well as i said above I did just that. Saw that the z3 showed an almost blank card and put it back in the note.
Aside from the data loss I am also intrigued how the folder names became changed from the moment just before I unmounted the card to when i put it in the z3. What on earth would have caused that?!
Sorry to hear that really. Tbh, it has to be a note issue being that when you unmounted and removed it that is when it happened. I would go through all it's settings to see if it or an apk installed has some weird permissions. Don't you just love android? I find it fascinating if not quite the child-like OS. Not enough transparency or control whatsoever.
afaik android doesn't have many issues with viruses but it might have been one.
or
the files are stored to a cloud and aren't on your card but online somewhere (an app uploaded them for you)
or
the files have been compressed (unlikely since i don't believe you can compress 50gb to 10gb)
anyways, you can try several sd card recovery tools
https://www.google.de/search?q=sd+c...f-8&oe=utf-8&gws_rd=cr&ei=3r8mVazTCszcavmGgCA

Music and Pictures are there but Play Music and Pictures can't find them.

I have a stock Nexus 5 running OS 6.0.1. Yesterday I decided to use DS Cloud to backup my documents to my Synology Disk Station (NAS). For simplicity I just told it to sync the entire internal storage folder. This appears to have been a BAD mistake.
Everything looked like it was going well I saw the files from my phone appearing in the backup folder on my NAS. IT was almost done when suddenly my Blue tooth music stopped streaming. I looked and Google Play Music says there are no files on my device. Browsing from a USB connection all of the files are in my Music folder, the app just can't seem to find them.
I uninstalled DS Cloud, rebooted the phone, etc. but it's still broke. Basically all of the files appear to be intact but Google Play Music, and Photos can not find anything. I used VLC to browse and play the files so they really are there and undamaged.
I suspect that some "virtual" folders or symbolic links may have been corrupted. The reason I think this is because when I open VLC it shows 4 paths "Internal Memory", "Emulated", "Emulated", "Emulated". I seem to recall that since the N5 does not actually have a SD card slot, it had a fake SD Card folder, and I do seem to remember vaguely there were some emulated or legacy folders, I assume for backwards compatibility with older apps.
In any event I don't remember exactly what those "special" folders were or how to recreate them.
I suspect that if I can recreate them then Music and Picture will start working again.
If I do a factory reset on the phone will that recreate the proper folders and links?
Any ideas?
More research/info.
OK doing more research, now I am fairly certain that the issue is the missing folders. Apparently there's a symbolic link to /data/user/0/com.google.android.music/files/music that is needed for Play Music. Using adb shell I can see that there is a sdcard folder and it is linked to /storage/self/primary.
I think I am on the right track but can anyone tell me what links/folders I need to create? Can I even create them without root? Is there a utility that will fix it? Will a factory reset/wipe fix it?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Don't know how to recreate the missing folders, but I'm fairly sure a complete factory reset will fix this. Unfortunately, you will lose your data if you go this route.
RESOLVED - The Hard Way
Last night I tried Settings > Backup & Restore > Factory Reset. It said it was doing it for several minutes. I read that it could take a long time, so I left it in the office and watched a TV show. Came back an ouur later and it was rebooted but 100% intact??? Even though it said "Erasing..." for at least 30 minutes, nothing was gone.
I used the phone all day and except for the original problem it worked fine.
Tonight I tried again. Same process. This time after the wipe it came up like a new phone. Strange.
Anyhow it looks like everything is working. Copied a few songs and pictures and they worked.
I am in the process of restoring everything else which is probably going to take some time...

SM-G950F DevBase sudden data loss in internal memory

This is just going to be sort of a blog post of what happened to me recently. Not asking questions, or anything of that kind, just if someone else faces this problem then we can see we're not alone.
OK So I was using DevBase (sorry, forgot the version and installed lineage, it was one of the android 8.x.x versions from around a couple of months after official 9.x.x was released, because I hated the new UI.), rooted, Magisk installed (basically for AdAway only, because I didn't know of Blokada before) and Xposed installed (wasn't using it for anything, just experimented with it a couple of months ago and didn't bother removing it yet).
I've always had my storage space close to full, both internal and external memory cards. It's ususally full of pictures and videos saved from reddit, 4chan, tumblr, my meme and porn collections. I could just copy them to my pc, but having to use that ****ty MTP protocol which copies everything slow A.F. and unreliable as hell as well... I very rarely make a backup of my phone. I was just planning to do a major backup (basically just moving my stuff to my pc) of the past year or so of using this phone.
I think it's also worth mentioning that my phone has always been in a sh.tty condition. I bought it with a fully cracked screen, with a mostly non working lcd, and it was network locked before someone unlocked it. I replaced the screen and the back glass with some cheap chinese generic stuff (I know...), which I also managed to misalign the adhesive on, so it wasn't water- or dust resistant anymore and has been to 2 heavy rains since then (where it detected water in the usb port, didn't let me charge it, and had to plug it in while booting in order for it to let me charge it). My sd- and sim card slot has also been having issues since I've got the phone basically, it never did go fully in, even though it was working fine. The case I was using (a spigen case, which later turned out to be a counterfeit, and the seller was also removed from ebay along with the listing, but looks very good) held it in place so I just thought I'm going to see what's going on with it when buying a new battery and new usb port when it fails, and when I have to replace the back glass anyways which is also cracked by this time (xd). So yeah, these might play a role in all what happened.
Couple of days ago I started getting weird messages in the camera app that I couldn't record video to internal storage (64gb). Even though in ES File Explorer it showed a couple of gigs free, these numbers have never been too accurate. I deleted some old, unused apks (I don't use google play or services, I install everything from apks) and large unnecessary videos from both the internal and external storage (wasn't sure which one the camera was using). Still got the same message in the camera app, and in ES File explorer there were some weird happenings, like the deleted files didn't reall disappear, and when I tried to delete them again it said it couldn't find the file. I was too tired for this bs so I just set the camera's saving location to the external sd (128gb), and called it a day temporarily.
A couple of days later I deleted some of the apps in order to free some space up on the phone. I also put my apps into folders, my app selector has never been so tidy. Everyone in our house has been having problems with wifi in the past couple of weeks so I didn't really worry when some issues with wi-fi came up. There was an exclamation mark besides the wifi symbol and it was using 4g. As if it was connected to a wifi network, but had no internet access. This has been the case in the past a few times. This tim though, when I turned of mobile data, wifi just worked fine with the exclamation mark. When I turned it back on, it was using 4g again. Turning wifi on and off didn't seem to help, so I disabled and removed AFWall+, which I thought could be causing problems here. This didn't help either, so...
I decided to restart the phone. It restarted, and after booting, all I had was a black screen with a notification bar. I was waiting, but nothing seemed to happen. The screen didn't even want to turn off for a while. Then I got my lockscreen, where I don't use any codes or anything. At this point I don't remember in which menu I am, probably just the black screen still, with the phone app crashing constantly, and some other apps occasionally. OK, I thought, I'll just restart this and it'll work fine, even though this many crashes at the same time never happened to me before with this phone. It restarted, first thing I noticed that the apps weren't in folders, rather they were just in alphabetical order. Then I noticed some notifications about setting up certain samsung apps etc. When I started some apps, I noticed, none of them had data. My (not synced, of course, because muh botnet) Firefox bookmarks, history, let alone the open tabs. My music playlists in AIMP, the phone numbers, logins to discord, messenger. Everything was lost. In ES File Explorer the internal memory, which was almost full, had 40gbs free... oops...
Fortunately, my external sd, where my recent photos, videos, and 100gb music library is, is intact. Thank god. I just made a backup of that to my pc, formatted the sd, and now through adb in twrp recovery I'm trying to create an image of the internal 64gb memory to the external 128gb, so I can mount the image on my pc and maybe revive some of my memes and such. This is needed because you can't mount your phone easily to the pc in order for it to show up like a mass storage device. You can't use recuva and others on MTP devices....
I now have a 64gb image of my data partition. , or whatever that was mounted to. I will look into restoring the files later.
Moral of the story: nothing. Maybe that I should've been better off using stable roms, use lineage instead of trying to remove/disable google stuff from some touchwiz roms, make backups regularly.

Categories

Resources