Database Users

Problems with memory

Hi all I'm hoping someone can help me (and if this is the wrong forum for this problem I apologise but I saw nowhere else) I also apologise for the length but i find its good to give background when asking for help.
I recently bought an O2 XDA II and a 4Gb sd card to go with it (before i found out lots of people have problems with 4Gb). It was working fine, i put it in the phone and it showed 4Gb, I installed some programs and they went in fine. Then i went to copy music across and hit problems, sometimes it told me not enough memory (with 3.8 Gb free) other times it waould all copy fine but would not show any of the files (as if they'd been deleted) yet the space requirement for them was still gone, and with the files that did come across most just kept looing and last seconds of other tracks.
So i copied off me programsso i could put them back and after reading on here where it was mentioned to format the card on desktop first with card reader, I tried that, but the card only formatted to 1Gb so i put it back in the phone and hit format again and it came back to 4Gb. same problem though with the songs, can't copy can't play. So I put it back the the computer and deleted the dead files then copied them straight on through the card reader and played them through the pc fine but back in the phone i have gobbledegook file and folder names.
So i look around and find a program called flash formatter for ppc's and try that but it only formats to 1Gb and now heres the BIG problem i cannot format it back to 4Gb whatever i use
is there anyone at all on here who can help me at least get the card back to 4Gb as i can at least use that space to copy videos/pics/files and software to and get another card for music
Cheers
Belarin

could it have been a fake 4GB card which was really 1GB?
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=267475&highlight=partition
this is also a good read

I don't think its a fake... Last night i formatted on my desktop (to 1Gb)and then copied just over 1Gb of large fileswondering if it was just reporting wrong but it did only copy the 1Gb HOWEVER when i put it back in the xda it asked me to format and put it back to 4Gb (which made me happier) i then put it back in the desktop and filled it upto to 4Gb and all files worked fine so i dont think its fake

HD2 destroyed my SD card?

Hello.
After trying the android booting, for 5-6'th time (all working), now the phone can't see the SD card. I thought it was only on the phone, but when i insert the card, in adapter and connect to pc, then NOTHING happens. Like if the card wasn't there.. Hmm, any clue? Usually I just formatted. But now, I can't format a SD card which "isn't there."
Please.

any one??? :S

mooooooa said:
Hello.
After trying the android booting, for 5-6'th time (all working), now the phone can't see the SD card. I thought it was only on the phone, but when i insert the card, in adapter and connect to pc, then NOTHING happens. Like if the card wasn't there.. Hmm, any clue? Usually I just formatted. But now, I can't format a SD card which "isn't there."
Please.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sounds like your sd card maybe corrupt, they can die for no apparent reason, its happen to me twice in about 4yrs, tho i always buy from CEX they offer a 1yr warranty & just replace it if its within that time.
There's been a few threads about this;
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=712281
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=646731

Which brand?
mooooooa said:
Hello.
After trying the android booting, for 5-6'th time (all working), now the phone can't see the SD card. I thought it was only on the phone, but when i insert the card, in adapter and connect to pc, then NOTHING happens. Like if the card wasn't there.. Hmm, any clue? Usually I just formatted. But now, I can't format a SD card which "isn't there."
Please.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
What is the brand of the memory card?

hey dude,i got the same problem as yours few days ago..cant do much abt it,i just buy a new one..some says the htc that makes the sd card problem

Hi,
My 8 GB sd card lags when i`m scrolling in the file manager.
In addition, the sd card drains the HD2 battery. I loose 35% in 6 hours in flight mode, but only 4% when not in flight mode without the sd card... ( this also yields for the original sandisk 2 GB sd card that was supplied with the phone).
Anyone experienced the same issue?
Is this hardware or software related, and can i fix this myself?

Error check your microSD card using your computer then switch your phone off, put the card back in it and switch your phone back on. The phone will need to index your music/video files etc so go to the relevant tabs and let it do its stuff. See how that helps.

mooooooa said:
Hello.
After trying the android booting, for 5-6'th time (all working), now the phone can't see the SD card. I thought it was only on the phone, but when i insert the card, in adapter and connect to pc, then NOTHING happens. Like if the card wasn't there.. Hmm, any clue? Usually I just formatted. But now, I can't format a SD card which "isn't there."
Please.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i got a new HD2 and it came with a MicroSD card. I put a couple of cooked ROMs on it and everything was fine for about a week and then the card jsut stopped working. I didnot use it on any other phone or on my PC and it just died.
I own an HTC Hero as well and i put the card in it but it wouldnt recognize it. It has never happened to me before. Never has a card died on me.
I think its a problem with the way the HD2 accesses the SDcard. I wouldnt know specifics but this is the first phone that fried my SD card.

Hey guys, I had the same issue. The SD card stopped working and cannot be formatted now via computer.

My experience with Windows Mobile is that the SD/CF driver is the weakest link. The problem seems to be simultaneous accesses drive it bonkers. I've had the disappearing card problem on other PDAs but usually removing it, doing a reboot with it out, and then inserting it after the reboot is complete will fix it. If it doesn't show up immediately DON'T do anything for a while, it could be doing a CHKDSK on the card, and if you mess with it it will screw it up worse.
Once it shows up what I would recommend is hooking up via USB in CF Disk mode (not Activesync) and doing a format on the drive from Windows.
Last night I got a new 32gb Class 4 MicroSD from China (unnamed) and stuck it in, worked fine, so I backed up all my data to my 'puter off the T-Mobile Class 2 16gb and changed to the new 32gb SD. I started the copy and after a while went to bed.
This morning I got up and it had died during the copy. It was giving me an error on the new MicroSD. It had copied about 75% but was asking to continue or skip. I ended up having to cancel it because it appeared full but it was not. After a reboot I found a ton of FILEXXX.CHK files which indicated it was doing a chkdsk.
Looking at it with SoftWinter.com's Storage Tools the disk was formatted with 512 byte cluster size, way too small for such a large disk, so it was not really out of space just out of cluster nodes. If you have lots of files (I had 10,000) each takes up at least one, even if the file is only 5 bytes. So I reformatted it from the 'puter to 32k cluster size and started the copy over. Seems to be working better now.
Please note that using larger cluster size also will help performance when writing and reading large files as it has to do less directory accesses. Small cluster size is good if you have a lot of small files as it doesn't waste as much space. You lose on average 1/2 the cluster size for each file, as the last node is almost never full.

mknewman said:
My experience with Windows Mobile is that the SD/CF driver is the weakest link. The problem seems to be simultaneous accesses drive it bonkers. I've had the disappearing card problem on other PDAs but usually removing it, doing a reboot with it out, and then inserting it after the reboot is complete will fix it. If it doesn't show up immediately DON'T do anything for a while, it could be doing a CHKDSK on the card, and if you mess with it it will screw it up worse.
Once it shows up what I would recommend is hooking up via USB in CF Disk mode (not Activesync) and doing a format on the drive from Windows.
Last night I got a new 32gb Class 4 MicroSD from China (unnamed) and stuck it in, worked fine, so I backed up all my data to my 'puter off the T-Mobile Class 2 16gb and changed to the new 32gb SD. I started the copy and after a while went to bed.
This morning I got up and it had died during the copy. It was giving me an error on the new MicroSD. It had copied about 75% but was asking to continue or skip. I ended up having to cancel it because it appeared full but it was not. After a reboot I found a ton of FILEXXX.CHK files which indicated it was doing a chkdsk.
Looking at it with SoftWinter.com's Storage Tools the disk was formatted with 512 byte cluster size, way too small for such a large disk, so it was not really out of space just out of cluster nodes. If you have lots of files (I had 10,000) each takes up at least one, even if the file is only 5 bytes. So I reformatted it from the 'puter to 32k cluster size and started the copy over. Seems to be working better now.
Please note that using larger cluster size also will help performance when writing and reading large files as it has to do less directory accesses. Small cluster size is good if you have a lot of small files as it doesn't waste as much space. You lose on average 1/2 the cluster size for each file, as the last node is almost never full.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hey
i hope for your sake im wrong, but as far as ive been able to find out in my own searching, only san disk has released a 32gb micro sd & its only class 2.
there has been a lot of talk of fake 32gb micro sd's from china, most are actually 4gb re-programed to read as 32gb on your phone or pc, but when you start to fill them with files more than their actual capacity they will only overwrite prev' files & become corrupt.
i actually pick up 1 (32gb) last weekend from a local store, tried to copy the contents of my 16gb, 7gb copied then an error occurred, 2nd attempt 9gb copied but files unreadable by phone or pc, fortunately i always buy from this store & they refunded (£50), straight away, still have 2 16gb cards ive had for about 9mnths with no probs.
there is another longer thread over in the Q&A section, you guys may find some useful feed back over there: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=646731

Well, the one I got says SanDisk and I have done a full format and surface analysis, it checks out, but I am having trouble writing to it. Not sure what is up with it right now. I knew it was a fake but I thought it was a real fake, not a piece of junk. I hope you are wrong.

I´ve got problems too. I have two SanDisk 16 GB microSDHC cards and both of them are giving similar problems.
I´ve got my HD2 a few days ago and initially I used my old 16 GB card I bought with the X1 (then used with my TP2 and latest the HD2). Everything was working fine initially but then the problems arose. Now I have those problems:
1. Audio Manager has problems reading my music library. iPlay can read it though. Windows Media Player takes a long time building my music library but manages to do that eventually.
2. HTC Album can read my albums sometimes - sometimes not.
3. Resco Photo Manager can read the albums but sometimes it takes a long time to do it.
4. The computer can access the card without any problems after formatting and it seems not to be any problems reading or writing files to it. Installations of cabs stored on the memory card works.
5. Total Commander can access the card without any problems but takes slightly longer time than before to show all folders.
6. Running chkdsk in Windows gives the result of a perfectly working card.
7. The phone is draining battery in an abnormal way with the card inserted.
8. Flashing ROMs from the card worked initially but not any longer. Now it shows the threecolor bootloader screen instead.
The interesting thing is the fact both of my 16 GB cards has the exactly the same symptoms. I will try them in my X1, TP2 and Vivaz later to check out their behaviour.
When I inserts my old 8 GB card (everything made by SanDisk) everything works without any problems. Flashing ROMs work normally etc.
I´m running the Omega XT 3.0 and are using HardSPL3. The 16 GB card has worked perfectly initially with this ROM and HSPL so I don´t think they are related.
The whole thing seems to indicate some kind of "incompatibility" between the phone and the 16 GB cards. It´s like it is unable to handle that size of card correctly. It seems like it "trashes" the file system. My older 16 GB card started to behave badly which caused me to buy a replacement and now that replacement has the exactly the same behaviour.
My 8 GB card is an "ultra" SanDisk card. The troublesome cards are Class 2 cards. I began to have the impression the problem is some kind of issue with Class 2 - because the cards itself seems to be working after formatting.
I have formatted them with either Panasonic SDFormatter and the Format SD application on the phone. Both options gives the same result.

[Q] 32 gig card trouble

I have recently purchased a 32gb micro sd card. When I go to put new music on it, it shows from the pc side that it is loading on the external drive(g2 phone) and form the phone it says that it is on there. However when I disconnect the phone only the last album that I put on there stays and the music player will state that "this type of file cannot be played". I have formatted the card through the computer and to no avail, it acts the same.. I did format it on the Android and it worked, temporarily and could load music from my computer for a few days, then it stopped. I am clueless as to what is going on with it. p.s. I tried placing it in a card reader and it did the same, but i did not format it first that time. I seem to think the android is placing a bad file on it causing all these issues. (again I say this because when I format it through the phone it will work temorarilly) any help would be great, I really want toload my phone with music.

theradioinside said:
I have recently purchased a 32gb micro sd card. When I go to put new music on it, it shows from the pc side that it is loading on the external drive(g2 phone) and form the phone it says that it is on there. However when I disconnect the phone only the last album that I put on there stays and the music player will state that "this type of file cannot be played". I have formatted the card through the computer and to no avail, it acts the same.. I did format it on the Android and it worked, temporarily and could load music from my computer for a few days, then it stopped. I am clueless as to what is going on with it. p.s. I tried placing it in a card reader and it did the same, but i did not format it first that time. I seem to think the android is placing a bad file on it causing all these issues. (again I say this because when I format it through the phone it will work temorarilly) any help would be great, I really want toload my phone with music.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Put the same file on a known good SD card. If it stays, it's a bad card. Most of the time the company the card came from will replace it for free (like Wintec did with a bad card that couldn't handle an EXT4 partition).

It is not just one file, it can be multiple files, like I stated in the other thread (I apologize to do two on here, but I rarely have to ask for help, I am usually able to figure the problem out, but this one has got me) I have checked the card with h2test and it states that it does have 32 gigs on it but that the card is corrupt, I have formatted the quick way with sd formatter. What puzzles me is that at one time I was able to load more on it and now I cannot. I feel that there is a fix, I am just not finding it yet.(okay im testing while updating, if i uplug and replug the phone and place music on it, it will only keep the last folder, for instance i put nirvana nevermind on it, it will keep it, i then put a folder with two albums on it, say radiohead the bends and kid a, it will replace the last one , I am certain that space is not the issue, due to having placed less files on it the first time I restored the card agai)

Did you buy this card from ebay? A lot of counterfeit card on there. Cards that say they are 32gb but will only hold a quarter of that.

ostinq said:
Did you buy this card from ebay? A lot of counterfeit card on there. Cards that say they are 32gb but will only hold a quarter of that.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
+1
Try writing zeros with dd to the card... but be careful, dd will destroy anything you point it at, without hesitation. This is a typical dd command:
$dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=32000 of=/dev/somepartition

Where did you buy it? Like others have mentioned, it sounds like a counterfeit or broken card.

what is dd, and how can i tell if it is fake, every program ive used to check it goes through 29gigs of partition

theradioinside said:
what is dd, and how can i tell if it is fake, every program ive used to check it goes through 29gigs of partition
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
DD is found in the terminal emulator on linux/unix systems. Be carefull, you can destroy everythign on a partition with it.
Also, you'll have to reformat afterwards ... the sdcard

theradioinside said:
what is dd, and how can i tell if it is fake, every program ive used to check it goes through 29gigs of partition
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Lots of the counterfeits are tampered with to report the "alleged" GB capacity. Its not until you try to transfer the files, that you run into problems and realize you were taken.
Again, where did you buy the card???

I apologize for not having answered your question, I bought it on eBay, I have been given a refund though. Where should I look for one at instead?

I got mine on amazon for like 55 bucks a few weeks ago been working great. It was a class 4 adata with a little blue usb card reader.

okay i bought a sandisk from a trusted store and again same thing, i am lost

What trusted store?

newegg class 4

Yup, that's about the must trusted store there is!
Any luck with lower capacity cards working? I'd say maybe its just a defective card. But its weird to have a string of bad luck like this. Is it possible the SD card tray on your phone is damaged?

Do you have an after market battery? Just curious...
Sent from my T-Mobile G2 using XDA App

Also do you use the turn mass storage mode on/off option?
Sent from my T-Mobile G2 using XDA App

[Q] Lots of photos got corrupted during copying to PC!

I was just this moment ago proceeding to move all the photos that had been saved to the MicroSD inside my GT-i9505 to the PC via USB connection. I was using the default MTP/PTP(?) explorer interface to find my photos.
I must've had something like 3GB worth of photos and videos on the card (I went a bit crazy with the camera in recent weeks!) and thought there would be nothing wrong with moving them off the card and onto my PC's hard disk. The whole moving process took quite a while so I thought I'd leave it to do its thing and then come back once it had finished.
But when I did, I noticed something bizarre - the folder was reported to come in at 2.55 TB (yes, *terabytes*!). I thought it was a silly Windows Explorer bug, but I reopened the window and checked Properties, and yup, still 2.55 TB. The drive partition I moved them to was compressed so I didn't actually need that much space, but it was still worrying. I checked some of the files and realised a fair amount of them were reported to be 3.42 GB each! The compressed size (size on disk) Windows 7 reported on the other hand was only 4 KB. Uh-oh. I tried to open them but Windows' own picture viewer had errors with them. I checked one file through a hex editor and noticed the majority of the file was just blank data followed by a smidgen of data at the very end, with no sign of headers.
So somehow, by doing something as innocent as moving photos and videos off of an S4-mounted MicroSD card, they got corrupted beyond repair in the process! What the hell?!
I'm gutted. Out of a total of 1,029 files and roughly 3GB, I managed to recover only 265 JPGs and 793 MB. Why did this happen? Is this a known issue with the phone or with MicroSD cards? I'm wondering whether it's anything to do with the MicroSD card I used - a non-brand specific 16GB one bought from my local Maplin and in a Maplin cardboard packet (online link at maplin.co.uk/micro-secure-digital-sdhc-memory-card-228011). The odd thing is that the phone and the OS reported no problems with the card, and the photos and videos saved to the card were fine and perfectly viewable on the phone just before I moved them off. As it is, I've now got 2 1/2 TBs worth of (presumably) permanently-damaged media files. Is there anything else I can do?
What I'm using, as follows:
Samsung Galaxy S4 GT-i9505
16GB Maplin-brand MicroSD card
Windows 7 32-bit
If you need any other specs, let me know.

No handy words of advice for next time, then?

This is what i do if i want to move ANY type of file from phone to other storage. I COPY, NOT MOVE files first to the destination that i want to and if they are successful then i will delete the other files from the phone. That way, if they do corrupt on destination, at least you still have originals because you copied only.
Hope this helps.

Yeah, sounds like something I'll have to remember for next time.
I wish I knew exactly what the cause was. It could've been anything - the drive partition and/or its compressed state, the MicroSD card, the rather crappy MTP interface forced upon by Google, the large volume of the media I was copying (like I said, it was over 1,000 files).
I have a small feeling it might be the last one somehow, as the photos stored directly on the phone (of which there weren't that many before I switched to MicroSD) moved across to PC in perfect condition, as did the screenshots I also captured. Furthermore, I decided to do a quick test with the MicroSD by picking a random spot and repeatedly pressing the camera button/icon to take as many photos as possible in a short period of time. I managed to make over 100 before I got bored, but when I moved them off the card in the same manner as before (phone mounted to USB, MTP interface) they came out unscathed and not in any ballooned size.
Has anyone else ever come across any issues with moving large amounts of files at once between PC and phone-mounted MicroSD? The only other time I did a very large mass transfer was with some various ROMs for emulator use to my Nexus 7 tablet's onboard storage, and as far as I know they all came out fine.
It's frustrating when it seems like a problem such as this one is totally alien and googling can't help with jack.

sd card corrupting

Hi,
I have a new 64gb class 10 sd card. It seems that it keeps on corrupting at some point inside my note 3. Most of my music has corrupted and photos i take become corrupted. Im pretty sure if i do a dskchk on pc it recovers them all but i dont have my pc with me now for another 4 weeks. Does anyone know why this is happenning? Ive reformatted the cards several times now its fat32.
The note is unrooter stock and its the first time ive had an sd in it.
Thankss

Are you sure it is an official card and not a fake? There are cheap cards out there that claim to have large capacity (and show as such when you insert them), but in fact they are actually hacked low end small capacity cards... As soon as you go over its actual size, files get corrupted.

gschot said:
Are you sure it is an official card and not a fake? There are cheap cards out there that claim to have large capacity (and show as such when you insert them), but in fact they are actually hacked low end small capacity cards... As soon as you go over its actual size, files get corrupted.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for the reply, how can i check it? I have the unrooted phone itself i dont have a laptop or computer at the moment

There are test tools, but the ones I know of run on pc. One indication of a fake card could be if it was offered online for a ridiculous low price.

Search SD card tools on Google play store, there are apps that can verify its authenticity but like gschot said, PC tools like H2testw are the best and most reliable.

ddogishere said:
Search SD card tools on Google play store, there are apps that can verify its authenticity but like gschot said, PC tools like H2testw are the best and most reliable.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks i will try that.
What i can say though is that when i used the pc to copy music over using the sd adapter the computer did it fine. I could play it no problem, then when i put it in my phone things became strange so i put it back into the computer which noticed a problem and suggested a scan. After scanning the files appeared again. I formatted the card to fat32 again and recopied all the music before i left, and 16gb of music has been reduced to 7.5bg of music through corruption. The phone doesnt tell me that they are corrupted. The folders are there with the first letters of the title changef to a μ symbol. E.g. DCIM folder changes to μCIM and the folder will be empty.

The sd card tester dont work because kitkat doesnt let apps write to the sd card. :L

supasye said:
The sd card tester dont work because kitkat doesnt let apps write to the sd card. :L
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The ~7gb after scanning almost confirms that it's a 8gb card. Format it again & put less than 7gb of files on it and see if will be OK.

There's several threads in the Q&A section...have a read at my posts.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-note-3/help/note-3-self-deleting-files-sd-card-t2852399
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=54068881&postcount=8