I have an android phone with a 64GB MicroSD card. I have had the phone/card for a little over 2 years now.
I’ve noticed in the last few months sometimes when I hook my phone to my PC to add/remove media files the phone won’t recognize the SD card, but the problem would always go away. I once had to remove then put the microSD card back in, but it was a minor issue.
Yesterday my phone worked fine, and I tried to hook it to my PC. When I unhooked it most of the apps gave an error message and the phone doesn’t recognize the card. The card works fine because I took it out and backed all the files up onto my PC.
So what is wrong? Do I need to do a factory reset? My phone doesn’t recognize my microSD card and the card seems to work fine based on how my PC recognizes it (and my phone worked fine until yesterday night before I plugged it into my PC).
Neato. So I had a 2GB microSD card laying around. I put that in my phone, and the phone recognizes that for some reason. I unmounted it and put the 64GB card back in and it doesn’t recognize that card.
Do I need to reformat the card? I already copied all the data to my PC. Do I reformat it and then copy/paste all the data back onto the card?
I think my phone was only designed to hold a 32GB card, and to get it to hold a 64GB I had to format it a certain way but I forget how I did it. That was a couple years ago. The card worked fine for 2 years until yesterday.
Putting the MicroSD card in my PC it says it is already Fat32 format. So I am guessing that that isn’t the problem, I know cards larger than 32GB give issues if they aren’t in that format. I’m at a loss about what to do.
If you have all your data saved, reformat the card in the phone. Sometimes there’s a minor difference between the way different machines format – just like the old floppy disk days.
Spend a couple bucks to get a proper size 32GB card. Even if you can resolve the problem with the current card, it’s pretty clear it’s going to unresolve itself again fairly soon.
It works fine in the PC because the PC’s software is designed for 64GB cards.
I speculate that it worked fine in the phone until you used enough data blocks that you started to get into the second half of the card. And once you got some data or directory stuff in the upper half of the address space that the phone’s software didn’t like, well …, that’s when you started seeing problems. Which eventually got so severe as more directory migrated over the border into inaccessible space that the phone won’t mount the card at all.
Well shit, How do I put my data on the new microsd card? I got a 32GB and the phone recognizes it, so how do I transfer my data? trying to copy/paste it from the PC didn’t work.
Can you put the old card in the PC, copy everything to a temp folder on the PC, put the new card in the PC, and copy everything to the new card from the temp folder? Or is that what you already tried?
I ‘seem’ to have gotten it to work, I think. It could fail again.
Apparently putting the new SD card into the PC and copying everything onto it doesn’t work. You have to put the card in the phone then connect the phone to the PC via its microUSB cable, then copy/paste everything (except my media files as I don’t have room for all those) onto the card that way. So far, at least, it seems to be working.
Back in the DOS days it was typical that we did things sorta behind the back of dumb software. In that way we could do things like move files to different drives without the apps being any the wiser.
With modern integrated software and a much more “no user serviceable parts, period” approach to sealed devices like un-jailbroken phones, our old instincts are generally harmful.
Always try the front door first before even starting down a path that smells even a bit like it might lead to a back door. In this case: If the device includes any software for moving files on and off it, first use that software as intended. If and only if that fails can you start trying back doors. But understand they’re a lot more likely to be *Hail Mary *moves with low chances of complete success. Not at all like the *business as usual *techno-trickery we all used to do.