Encryption - looked like hardware failure

[Shawnz]

I just wanted to give a heads up about an issue that turned out to be a non-issue today.

My Exchange policy requires the PIN password of course but it also requires the SD card be encrypted and that you supply a password for the certificate store. The latter two were not forced on my HTC Evo I just migrated from so these settings are new to me on the Rezound.

Wanting to be a good corporate minion I opted to encrypt the internal storage. This messed everything up. The SD card dissapeared and appeared damaged. It would not mount at all regardless of how many times to wipe it and try to re-mount it.

I took it to the local Verizon store and they said it was a hardware failure with the phone as it did not clear up after a factory reset.

I had resigned to exchanging the phone with Amazon Wireless and since I had nothing to lose I started playing with it and managed to fix it!

First I tried another SD card (the one from my Evo) and it would not read that either. This was making it look like a problem with the card reader.

I then pulled the SD card and the phone reported that the internal storage was damaged. I then erased the internal storage and it came back to life. I then powered down, put the SD card back in and erased the SD card again. This time it mounted right up after the erase process.

Lesson learned... DO NOT ENCRYPT THE INTERNAL STORAGE!

 

[MrSmith317]

I just wanted to give a heads up about an issue that turned out to be a non-issue today.

My Exchange policy requires the PIN password of course but it also requires the SD card be encrypted and that you supply a password for the certificate store. The latter two were not forced on my HTC Evo I just migrated from so these settings are new to me on the Rezound.

Wanting to be a good corporate minion I opted to encrypt the internal storage. This messed everything up. The SD card dissapeared and appeared damaged. It would not mount at all regardless of how many times to wipe it and try to re-mount it.

I took it to the local Verizon store and they said it was a hardware failure with the phone as it did not clear up after a factory reset.

I had resigned to exchanging the phone with Amazon Wireless and since I had nothing to lose I started playing with it and managed to fix it!

First I tried another SD card (the one from my Evo) and it would not read that either. This was making it look like a problem with the card reader.

I then pulled the SD card and the phone reported that the internal storage was damaged. I then erased the internal storage and it came back to life. I then powered down, put the SD card back in and erased the SD card again. This time it mounted right up after the erase process.

Lesson learned... DO NOT ENCRYPT THE INTERNAL STORAGE!

Thanks for that. My company uses touchdown and since touchdown encrypts it's data store, does not have this requirement(Thank God). I hope you logged a bug with HTC/Google about this.

From Nitrodesk:
Android does not support an encrypted file system on the SD card. If the server requests SD card encryption policy, TouchDown honors that by encrypting the attachments downloaded to SD card using AES-256 encryption. If the removable card encryption policy is enforced, moving the SD card from one device to another renders the downloaded attachment files unreadable.

 

[Shawnz]

The saga continues...

Without the 'internal storage' encrypted the exchange policy ended up setting the internal storage to read only. Because the SD is mounted down stream of the Internal storage the SD card ends up read only too.

Since I figure out how to fix it I decided to once again encrypt the internal storage. The SD card was already encrypted so I ticked the box to encrypt internal storage. Everything was still accessible but I still had the read only restriction. I then erased the phone storage while it was still encrypted and the read only flag cleared. I can now write to both internal storage and the SD card.

I'm not calling it 'good' yet because I have not re-booted the phone yet and I don't know if it is just a matter of waiting for the Exchange policy to hit again.

So far, so good:

 

[MessagingTech]

I've noticed this same issue on the Rezound using ActiveSync. We are not requiring SD card or internal encryption but yet the phone is requiring it. If you go to remove the encryption or eject the SD card the card will show up as damaged if put into another phone or back into the Rezound. Also when restarting the phone you will be prompted for the encryption password. During the setup process, the device is asking for a password for storage credentials. The only reason I can speculate on is our OWA website is using SSL connection so the phone is trying to store the SSL certificate?

 

[MessagingTech]

Ahh... after some more testing it does appear to be the hardware and not Exchange. I wiped both the SD card and the device itself and when trying to join a secured Wi-Fi network I was prompted to create the storage credentials password. It appears that the phone will only allow for certificates if this feature is turned on. Dislike

 

[Shawnz]

I've noticed this same issue on the Rezound using ActiveSync. We are not requiring SD card or internal encryption but yet the phone is requiring it. If you go to remove the encryption or eject the SD card the card will show up as damaged if put into another phone or back into the Rezound. Also when restarting the phone you will be prompted for the encryption password. During the setup process, the device is asking for a password for storage credentials. The only reason I can speculate on is our OWA website is using SSL connection so the phone is trying to store the SSL certificate?

That's my guess. I too have noticed the password prompt after re-booting the phone.

So far it's working great. I think that first time around I must have either canceled out of the password prompt or I somehow re-booted it before the encryption was done. It had internal and SD 'damaged' and it wouldn't fix either until I removed the SD, erased the internal storage, re-inserted the SD and then erased it.

I then was forced by policy to encrypt the SD again.. shortly after the SD goes read only if the phone storage is not encrypted as well. Once this is encrypted the read only flag would probably clear eventually but to help it along I erased it again and the read only flag cleared.

Now the phone operates normally except for prompting for the security password after a re-boot.