S7 Edge 32gb (Exynos) (No root) accidentally formatted adaptive storage. - Sprint Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge Questions & Answers

Hi all, hoping anyone could help me. I have an Exynos s7 edge launch version, (32gb) Which has never been rooted, and has had a 256gb micro SD used as adaptive storage.
Lately, large apps have not been able to install, with the phone constantly saying the phone is full, even though the micro SD is not full, with well over 50 -100 gb free on the external card which should be used with the adaptive storage.
I tried to re-migrate the data to fix the problem, and selected export or whatever the option there is, and the damn phone reformatted the SD card without asking me if I wanted to format.
Obviously this has ruined the adaptive storage, and screwed much of my data.
I had backed up bare basics with helium, but months of data and photos are not backed up.
Now I can't even open my camera, I am feeling somewhat sick and am very worried all of my photos of my family and all of the books and game data I had is gone.
Is there a way to solve this disaster?
I thought this thread may help anyone else who is in a similar bind, as I could not find anything about this particular problem by googling it.
If anyone can help, I would really appreciate it, are deleted data recovery programs and completely starting again my only options?
Where do I go from here? Thanks for reading this thread, and for any help offered.
Samsung must have really been joking when offering only 32gb and no supported adaptive storage on a beast of a phone like the s7.

Bumping this thread if anyone can help, still trying to fix my phone. Removed the SD card that contained the adaptive storage, and have not done any more to the SD card with the phone since the phone formatted it.
I attempted several data recovery programs on windows 7, but have yet to recover anything much. Just files in formats that are not very recognisable to me.
Anyone know if data can be recovered from the SD card the S7 formatted which contained the adaptive storage?
It is easy enough to recover data from a formatted hdd, but I do not know if data can be recovered from a formatted micro SD with Android OS. Does anyone know if it similar to the stripes on a RAID array? Is the data split between the internal sdd and the external?
This question has had 77 views and no responses, if anyone has some detailed knowledge they can share, I would appreciate it.
The S7 gave no warning it was going to format the drive, it just said it had completed the format. Is there any way back from this? I cannot even get the camera to start anymore, and a lot data and photos and game data and pdfs was lost.
If something concrete and verifiable could be marked down in this thread, it could help other people who have this problem, as Samsung seems unwilling to support a feature many people need.

Related

In a world of hurt after going to adaptive storage

This sucks. I got a 16 GB model some time ago expecting marshmallow and a good microSD card to be the ticket. I have a Sandisk Ultra 128 Gb class 10 card which is well regarded for speed and reliability. I FINALLY got Marshmallow recently and went through the process of getting my card reformatted for adaptive storage. I was surprised during the process that the phone gave me a warning that the card was slow and I may experience problems, but I pressed on.
Everything seemed to work fine after the 'conversion' and the phone seemed snappy enough. Though I hadn't yet installed any new programs in the new configuration. I merely backed up photos and audio media that was being stored on the card, and then restored them to their proper location after the reformat to integrate the card with internal storage.
I then installed some apps I had removed to make space on internal storage previously. Now the phone is totally unusable. I get about 1-3 minutes of usage after boot before it hangs up on a screen, or with the notification shade pulled down. The phone just totaly freezes; I can't even power it down (need to look up how to force it to shut down).
What have I gotten myself into? Why would that card be considered 'slow and/or inadequate' when I purchased it less than 6 months ago and it is rated a good and fast card?
Any suggestions on how to proceed? I need and counted on the combined storage capability (or I never would have gone or the 16 Gb model).
Thanks for any help.
oh, and random reboots and also the screen going blank but the phone not actually being off (battery died really fast) overnight. I'm trying to get into the bootloader and do traditional things like clearing dalvik cache (is that current? I haven't done much rooting and messing around with the guts of Andriod since Kit Kat), etc.
I had to revert too. Limited TWRP support, very slow apps, couldn't connect via USB to the SD storage. I bought the 16GB thinking the same thing. Was a mistake as of now.
Besides not being able to do anything with the card in TWRP, I'm having no problems using adaptive storage, and I too use a 128GB SanDisk Ultra.
Sent from my XT1575 using Tapatalk
I'm not worried about TWRP. I'm actually content with the phone non-rooted if adaptive storage works, since it's not carrier locked and I can do things that previously Verizon wouldn't let me. I'm not interested in mucking around with new ROM's and stuff anymore; too busy with other tinkering projects and i have plenty of other viable devices to do that with (amazon phone and tablet, older android phones, etc.). I want this one to be a stock daily driver; but I want it to f'ing work as indicated.
I just got done doing a factory reset, formatting the SD card as internal and restoring (system tool; is that a Moto thing or Lollipop+?). We'll see how it goes. I may just have mucked it up trying to convert to adaptive storage after having used it with Lollipop AND even moving some apps to the SD card.

Adoptable Storage on S7 Edge feedback?

Hi
I have seen some posts explaining on how to activate the adoptable storage on the S7/S7E, but never seen any feedback on it. So I have two questions to people who have done that to their S7:
1. Are the performances badly impacted by that 'mod'
2. Is that 'mod' impacted/canceled by Samsung firmware automatic updates?
Many thanks for your help
Phil
Also, can you reverse the process if resents are undesirable?
Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk
Yes would also like to hear some feed back on this. I'm still undecided
I just started using adoptable storage yesterday. I have a 64GB EVO+ in the phone, and I hated that a lot of the apps can't write on the microsd card because the lack of permission. I don't pull out the sdcard anyways.
Previously, if I move a photo to the microSD card, the file creation dates will all become the moment I moved it instead of the picture taken date and I didn't like that either.
After the adopting of the microSD storage, so far I didn't experience any slowness or lag or random misbehaviors. Taking pictures and reviewing them is still fast as I can remember. I only have 4.8GB out of 64GB occupied on the microSD at the moment. *EDIT: Camera RAW mode crashes all the time. I went back to disabling adoptable storage.
I also want more information on how we can reverse everything if needed, and also whether OTA updates are possible without any problems.
hp79 said:
I just started using adoptable storage yesterday. I have a 64GB EVO+ in the phone, and I hated that a lot of the apps can't write on the microsd card because the lack of permission. I don't pull out the sdcard anyways.
Previously, if I move a photo to the microSD card, the file creation dates will all become the moment I moved it instead of the picture taken date and I didn't like that either.
After the adopting of the microSD storage, so far I didn't experience any slowness or lag or random misbehaviors. Taking pictures and reviewing them is still fast as I can remember. I only have 4.8GB out of 64GB occupied on the microSD at the moment.
I also want more information on how we can reverse everything if needed, and also whether OTA updates are possible without any problems.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
a complete reverse is not hard just time consuming.
1. you have to copy everything you stored so far on your sd card on to computer
2. you delete them from the phone so when you mirgrate everything back to the internal storage the photos and music won't get copied.
3. you go into storage and you mirgrate.
4 you format the sd card as sd card again
P.S. Burst mode on you camera wills top function and will crash the camera app if you convert to adoptable storage. Please spread the word and ask others for a fix or at least a way to disable burst mode. T.T

Help Please! MAJOR SD card issues!

New to XDA, not new to Android.
Phone: Moto X Play
Rom: Stock Marshmallow 6.1
Issue: SD Card disappears randomly (formatted as internal storage!!!)
Bootloader never unlocked, never rooted.
I have a sandisk 32gb micro sd card that works when I first start the phone. The problem is that it will randomly, completely, disappear.
Now I'm not, IMO, a complete noob. I am fairly (99%) sure it is indeed the sd card at fault. Ok, not an issue, I can always replace it with a new one.
The issue is, of course, that EVERYTHING is on my SD card, most importantly, my photos.
Even without accessing a file manager (phone idle, browsing web, playing games) the sd card will eventually fail leaving it inaccessible until the phone is restarted. When attempting to access my photos, which is what I need most, it fails MUCH quicker.
Having not used the "Google Photos" app before (just Gallery), I am not at all sure if my photos were ever backed up online, If they were, I'm not sure where to look.
Trying to access them via usb, wifi file transfer, bt tranfer, and even from file managers on the phone itself, result in an almost immediate failure of the sd card. 5 seconds or so tops.
The card is formatted as "Internal Storage" and I have not been able to find a way to get a computer or anything else to read it, and I would imagine for security reasons, there is no way.
Here's the question: Is there any way to get photos off the sd card, that wont take me three million years in 5 second intervals, while having to restart the phone every bleeping time the sd card fails to get it to recognize the sd card again?
Suggestions please!
Thanks in advance,
Canabian
Canabian420 said:
New to XDA, not new to Android.
Phone: Moto X Play
Rom: Stock Marshmallow 6.1
Issue: SD Card disappears randomly (formatted as internal storage!!!)
Bootloader never unlocked, never rooted.
I have a sandisk 32gb micro sd card that works when I first start the phone. The problem is that it will randomly, completely, disappear.
Now I'm not, IMO, a complete noob. I am fairly (99%) sure it is indeed the sd card at fault. Ok, not an issue, I can always replace it with a new one.
The issue is, of course, that EVERYTHING is on my SD card, most importantly, my photos.
Even without accessing a file manager (phone idle, browsing web, playing games) the sd card will eventually fail leaving it inaccessible until the phone is restarted. When attempting to access my photos, which is what I need most, it fails MUCH quicker.
Having not used the "Google Photos" app before (just Gallery), I am not at all sure if my photos were ever backed up online, If they were, I'm not sure where to look.
Trying to access them via usb, wifi file transfer, bt tranfer, and even from file managers on the phone itself, result in an almost immediate failure of the sd card. 5 seconds or so tops.
The card is formatted as "Internal Storage" and I have not been able to find a way to get a computer or anything else to read it, and I would imagine for security reasons, there is no way.
Here's the question: Is there any way to get photos off the sd card, that wont take me three million years in 5 second intervals, while having to restart the phone every bleeping time the sd card fails to get it to recognize the sd card again?
Suggestions please!
Thanks in advance,
Canabian
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Format the card using computer (Not quick format )
Quick format didn't worked for me.
And don't make card as internal, use it as portable
with the sd card in the phone, go to settings - apps, show system apps. then select External Storage, force stop it or clear it cache. do the same to Media Storage. reboot the phone, once everything loaded wait for 5-10 minutes especially if you have lots of files in a large sd card. once that done, connect the phone to your pc (use mtp if i'm not mistaken) and hopefully you can now access the internal (sd card) contents.
jerryn70 said:
Format the card using computer (Not quick format )
Quick format didn't worked for me.
And don't make card as internal, use it as portable
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This will HOPEFULLY resolve the issue AFTER I get my photos off the card!
What I need help with is getting roughly 10 gigs of data off a card that works intermittently for roughly 5 seconds at a time....
-Canabian
pijes said:
with the sd card in the phone, go to settings - apps, show system apps. then select External Storage, force stop it or clear it cache. do the same to Media Storage. reboot the phone, once everything loaded wait for 5-10 minutes especially if you have lots of files in a large sd card. once that done, connect the phone to your pc (use mtp if i'm not mistaken) and hopefully you can now access the internal (sd card) contents.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I will try this and report back.
One question... If the card is formatted as internal storage, clearing data for external storage and media storage will not cause the phone to "forget" the sd card will it?
Thanks,
Canabian.
I think I have come up with a solution to my own problem. If this works satisfactorily, I will let others know as this may help many other people facing this issue.
I am on a linux pc. I am going to try to use RSYNC to copy the files over. This SHOULD copy files over, deleting them from the source folder as it goes. Once the sd card fails, which it WILL, once I reboot the phone and start rsync once again, it should "resume" where it left off.
Here is the command for anyone else that may need it:
rsync -v --progress --remove-source-files --recursive --append-verify /path/to/source/files /path/to/destination/folder
Hopefully this works the way I hope it will. Will post back with my results when I can.
Thanks again,
Canabian.
I had the same problem, and the solution (that maybe someone posted somewhere in the internet) is using a faster SD card. Since I switched to a sandisk extreme pro, the problem disappeared. Be careful, though, when using Samsung SD cards: my moto x play doesn't like them much (I had to replace them twice before buying the sandisk; in some way the partition tables of the Samsung SD cards were damaged, plus they became read-only, resulting in two unusable cards).
jauffre said:
I had the same problem, and the solution (that maybe someone posted somewhere in the internet) is using a faster SD card. Since I switched to a sandisk extreme pro, the problem disappeared. Be careful, though, when using Samsung SD cards: my moto x play doesn't like them much (I had to replace them twice before buying the sandisk; in some way the partition tables of the Samsung SD cards were damaged, plus they became read-only, resulting in two unusable cards).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
which samsung model did you use? I just replaced my normal class 10 strontium card yesterday with a brand new samsung evo plus u1 card and formatted it as internal storage. so far the phone feels a bit snappy with this card.
dude search a little in this section and i hope u find the fix.i just let u know that our device has very sensitive sd pins and many users had accidentally bented them and didn't know the problem!
i hope u are not one of them!so if you are lucky,next time u put the sd be veeeery careful!i personally didn't put it out from the time i bought it...
pijes said:
which samsung model did you use? I just replaced my normal class 10 strontium card yesterday with a brand new samsung evo plus u1 card and formatted it as internal storage. so far the phone feels a bit snappy with this card.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It was just a Samsung Evo class 10. The strange thing is that I tried also a Sandisk of the same class, which gave me only the "external memory missing" problem, while the Samsung ones became just unusable plastic. But maybe I should try better Samsung SD cards.

Mi A1 - new SD card showing double size than it is

Hello,
I just purchased a 64gb micro sd (samsung evo plus) card and inserted it into A1; formatted it as permanent storage, and now it shows as 128gb with half space used with system files. Tried reformatting on the laptop and doing it again in the phone, same result. As far as i can tell, it still works (still 64gb free), but it is annoying as it shows system is using half, so you dont have the real numbers.
I tried googling, found similar problems (a year ago), but no follow up how/if this is resolved. Im running latest 8.1 (november patch).
Any help / ideas?
thanks,
Jaka
After formatting you need to select an SD card as an external memory and then you will have a real state
All of this is done in the seting> memory setting
permanent storage is an extension of internal storage so all correct.
Thanks for clarifying. What is the difference between permanent/removable storage in terms of what the phone can store on it? My phone is full and need the extra space for pictures, cache (streaming apps burn a lot) and, if the card is good enough, apps.
thanks guys, always appreciate the support here on XDA!
jaka
jsuln said:
Thanks for clarifying. What is the difference between permanent/removable storage in terms of what the phone can store on it? My phone is full and need the extra space for pictures, cache (streaming apps burn a lot) and, if the card is good enough, apps.
thanks guys, always appreciate the support here on XDA!
jaka
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't' like an SD as an extension of internal memory, it becomes non removable and if it gets corrupted can cause serious problems with apps crashing. It also needs to be as fast as possible.
I would rather have it set as external/removable, you can still store all your media (music photo video etc) on it but it remains removable and the system does not reply on it.
Hey guys, a bit of an update.. Today a got a notification that i am running out of space, a few days after I have inserted a fresh 64 gig card (first post), but now take a look at these screenshots .. In a few days, my whole storage shows as 100% full, just with system files .. ?
I also do not see this extra space in root explorer (where can I?)
Can someone help with this issue? What is going on here?
Cheers,
Jaka

Moto G7 + SanDisk SD Storage - Encrypted folders.

Good evening.
Spend a few hours trying to see if I can recover my mother's phone files.
Issue:
Yesterday she said she can't see WhatsApp videos or images - new messages weren't loading. Error: Download Failed. The Download was Unable to complete. Please try again later.
She has 64 GB SanDisk SD and it used as adaptive storage. I checked her storage and I saw there was about 3 Gb free space on the phone, however SanDisk had only around 700 MB free.
Today I decided to move all her files to a computer (also she had Google Cloud photo backup, I checked and don't see any new photos or videos in the last few months, I am wondering if some kind of glitch could happen 2 months ago and now was the end of it), and when I connected her phone, it showed only SanDisk, no internal storage (I thought maybe because of adaptive storage it shows like one), but in this case it should've shown around 90 GB and it showed only 60 Gb?
Well I opened SanDisk and it was empty while it still showed that SD is not empty in ThisPC area.
I took the SD card out and plugged it back and some of the folders loaded. I downloaded some of the latest videos, and then found this video:
I did what it says there, however, external storage data system process could not be cleared, it was greyed out. So I just did Multimedia Data and Cache Clear. I also force stopped external storage process (and I think that part is what messed up everything).
Well, when I restarted the phone, all my SD folders looked like encrypted folders, while it still shows almost 60 GB of Data there.
I read online and see that Adaptive Storage is using some encrypted format and my assumption by doing steps above I messed up the encryption.
Question is there any hope to restore these SD files or I can forget about it and count it as a hard lesson of how not to try fixing SD card issues?
Also, I'm kind of upset that Google Cloud backup didn't work as I hoped it would. Any recommendation how to better sync and keep backup of all Data (photo, videos, apps, messages) in the cloud? In Case the phone dies or SD card dies, how I can just clone everything from a Backup?
Attached are photos of what I see now when I connect the phone to the PC.
Could anybody share any suggestions? Anything I could try?

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