Help Accessing SD card via MTP

[pwabrahams]

I'm running Android 6.0.1 on my phone and Kubuntu 14.04 on my laptop. I also have a 32GB micro SD card in the phone. I've tried to set that card up as internal storage, and the prompts when I inserted the card seemed to indicate that I was doing just that. But on the phone in Storage and USB, the SD card is shown a a eeparate entity, and Internal Storage shows just 5 GB. MTP access shows only internal storage, not the SD card. How can I get access to the SD card from the laptop?

I should note that before doing operations on the phone, I took the SD card out of the phone and inserted it into the laptop. There I set up an MSDOS-type partition table on the card and then created a single (primary) partition with a FAT32 format. Having done that, I moved the card back to the phone, where it seemed to be recognized, and seemed to give me the choice of using it as internal storage. But that doesn't appear to be what actually happened, since MTP shows internal storage only and I can't copy any significant amount of data to it over the USB cable.

 

[lvt]

Maybe you didn't install the right USB drivers for your Lubuntu computer.

Did you try it on a Windows computer?

 

[Hadron]

The phone will use MTP for connecting to the internal storage as well, so we can assume that MTP is working.

Unfortunately I've no experience with adoptive storage (it is something I don't want to use in fact) so not sure what normal behaviour is.

 

[tommo47]

The only thing I would add is that looking at the procedure on my HTC M9, it seems that the SD card must be formatted on the device when first installed, for either normal SD storage or as Internal storage.

If Internal storage is selected, the card can then only be used on that device unless it is reformatted.

 

[lvt]

The SD card can be formatted by any device or computer, as long as you selected FAT32.

 

[pwabrahams]

I'm now not sure that MTP has anything to do with my problem -- the difficulty in accessing the SD card that way is just a symptom. The real problem seems to be that after (logically) ejecting the card and then reformatting it as internal storage, it doesn't become internal storage. I'm uploading a screenshot that shows internal storage and the SD card, and they are two separate items even though I tried to use the SD card as additional internal storage. What am I missing?

 

[tommo47]

The way I read that is your original Device (Internal) storage (5.0GB) and your SD card now installed as Internal storage (29.7GB) form a total Device (Internal) storage of 34.7GB, which is as it should be, albeit consisting of two physically separate memory areas which they are, but to the device it is 'Device (Internal) storage', of which 4.89GB is in use leaving 29.81Gb available.

 

[Slug]

The way I read that is your original Device (Internal) storage (5.0GB) and your SD card now installed as Internal storage (29.7GB) form a total Device (Internal) storage of 34.7GB, which is as it should be[...]

Correctomundo, sir!

Even under the adoptive storage paradigm individual volumes are identified discretely, albeit under the Device Storage label .

 

[pwabrahams]

Things are getting curiouser and curiouser, as Alice in Wonderland said. I discovered by experiment that if I format the SD card as portable, I can view it via MTP. But if I format it as internal, I don't seem to be able to view it at all via MTP. It was formatted as Internal for the image I sent previously. In other words, it seems that I can get 34GB of internal storage but I can only view 5GB of it via MTP. Is that really true?

I just got a clue to a possible cause but not a solution: I'm using Cyanogenmod. Perhaps it does something different with the SD card than stock Android. FileManager doesn't show the SD card at all as far as I can tell.

File Manager also doesn't see the other 29GB.

 

[tommo47]

Things are getting curiouser and curiouser, as Alice in Wonderland said. I discovered by experiment that if I format the SD card as portable, I can view it via MTP. But if I format it as internal, I don't seem to be able to view it at all via MTP. It was formatted as Internal for the image I sent previously. In other words, it seems that I can get 34GB of internal storage but I can only view 5GB of it via MTP. Is that really true?

I just got a clue to a possible cause but not a solution: I'm using Cyanogenmod. Perhaps it does something different with the SD card than stock Android. FileManager doesn't show the SD card at all as far as I can tell.

File Manager also doesn't see the other 29GB.

I've got my SD card as Portable storage and don't intend to change it, I have more than sufficient Internal storage and from what I've read about Adoptable storage it's too restrictive for me anyway, but what I did notice is that part of the procedure is the migration of apps/other data from the existing Internal storage to the SD Internal storage. Have you done that?. If not, I assume the SD storage will have nothing on it to read, although it is showing a 704MB usage.

Does nothing show if you tap on the 'SanDisk SD card' in 'Storage & USB' to display the usage details?. I'm guessing that you should also see the 'Migration' option to move apps and/or other data from original internal storage to the SD internal storage.

 

[pwabrahams]

The question on my mind is whether it's possible to move any app to Portable SD Storage, or just those apps that have made provision for the move. If any app can be moved, that solves my problem, but it so far does not appear to be the case.

 

[Hadron]

Apart from system apps my understanding was that you could move any app. But I don't have or want this feature, so can't confirm.

 

[tommo47]

If you go into 'App info' and tap 'Storage', if you don't have a 'Change' option you can't move that app to SD card.

As Hadron said, and certainly on my M9, none of my system apps or pre-installed apps such as Gmail have the 'Change' option.

With some exceptions, one being 'Sky Go', any app I have downloaded from Play Store has the 'Change' option.

 

[tommo47]

The first time you tried to set up your SD card as internal storage, you incorrectly formatted it on your PC and that, I think, is why you couldn't see it via MTP. You then logically removed it and reformatted it using your device, after which you posted the screenshot which was identical to the You Tube video I linked to on your other thread, indicating that it was successfully set up as adopted storage.

At that point, or subsequently, did you :-

1) Try to access by MTP again.
2) Try to migrate apps or other data.
3) Bring up the data useage details for the SD card in 'Storage & USB.

 

[pwabrahams]

I'm still having trouble with the Marshmallow extension to internal storage. Having gone back and forth between portable and nonportable formatting of my SD card, I think I've settled on the nonportable format. But now I'm experiencing something very odd: the picture of storage I get with mtp is different from the picture I get with File Manager. I have folders that appear empty when I try to access then via mtp but have lots of data in them (in the form of subfolders) when I look at them with File Manager. This becomes more that just a cosmetic problem when I want to use mtp to transfer data onto the device.

 

[pwabrahams]

I now realize that I was under a misapprehension: even though "Internal Storage""storage and the SD card are listed separately under Storage and USB in the Settings, the SD card is still part of internal storage since I formatted it that way. For that reason the "Internal Storage" label is misleading since it seems to imply that the SD card is not internal storage.

I still don't understand why mtp and File Manager (as well as ES File Explorer) should disagree on their view of the file system, but at least I've been able so far to find workarounds for the differences.

 

[Bg260]

If the card is being used as your internal data (app) storage, then you will not be able to see it with MTP. The data partition can only be manipulated with root access and a similarly capable file browser.