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G3 stopped recognizing any inserted SD card

rich6661

Member
A couple days ago my G3 started a constant rebooting. At the same time I got messages that the "SD card needed to be properly ejected" from the notification bar. I hadn't tried to eject it. I powered down and removed and reinserted it and for 10 minutes it was fine but then started again.
Now the phone will not recognize any SD card i insert. The original one and another different one. The phone was not dropped by the way.
Any ideas as to what happened? Thanks.
 
If formatting doesn't help, then it's a sign that your SD card slot is going bad. You could try using a compressed air can to try and blow out any dust that might be on the contacts in the SD card slot. If that doesn't help, then the slot is bad. Be careful because since that's where your SIM card is, that could also become a problem.

Yesterday, I took the 49A OTA and after reboot, I started getting the SD card unmounted messages. And somewhere amongst those messages, I saw one time where it couldn't sense my SIM card. My phone is 2 years old and I have never seen the messages and before the OTA, I never saw them. I had assumed the OTA caused an issue (others were seeing this after taking the 49A OTA), so I TOT flashed back to 10b. I was still seeing the messages, so it appears my SD/SIM slot is going bad. I'm going to take it into Cell Phone Repair (CPR) to see what the cost would be to get it fixed since they do free estimates. If I could, I'd replace the motherboard myself. I had to take the phone apart last night because something happened when I tried to TOT flash back to 10b (which I've done numerous times) and it resulted in the flash getting interrupted. My phone was then in the dreaded QHSUSB_BULK 9008 brick mode. I've never had to fix this mode before, but I read about it which requires opening up the back and getting the motherboard exposed, removing the CPU cover and then shorting a connection on the motherboard before hooking up a USB cable to the PC in order to force the phone to be sensed so that you can then manually flash each partition separately. Not fun (well, to be perfectly honest, it was fun once I knew how to do it), but I'm back up at this point.
 
I'll give the compressed air solution a try. But I'm not going the tear down route. I'll rather get the V20 or wait for the S7.
I will say I'm having no SIM card issues any the OTA update a couple days ago hasn't caused any issues.
Thanks for your reply and suggestion.
 
I'll give the compressed air solution a try. But I'm not going the tear down route. I'll rather get the V20 or wait for the S7.
I will say I'm having no SIM card issues any the OTA update a couple days ago hasn't caused any issues.
Thanks for your reply and suggestion.

Good to hear no SIM card issues. Just found out today, thinking everything was working, that I cannot send nor receive phone calls nor text messages. Going to have to do a factory data reset and see how that goes. Grr!

UPDATE: I think what happened was I restored some system settings from the LG Backup and that screwed up the settings for the radio. It kept saying I was roaming. The factory data reset fixed it, but only after doing it twice. Wow!

Still getting some messages about the SD card, but they seem to go away after awhile. Still going to have it looked at. Otherwise, I'm back up and operational. That 49A OTA was a pain! ;)
 
Last edited:
Okay. Last update. The SD card started getting ejected again. Another user in another forum stated he went to VZW and they informed him that the latest OTA for the G3 has been found to be incompatible with the phone.

I've flashed back to 48A and the issues have gone away. It's been almost 24 hours since going back to 48A and I haven't seen one SD card issue since.

Avoid the 49A OTA at all costs. No word on when/if a fix will come.
 
Update from last post: things are bad. SD card constantly gets unmounted no matter what under any version now. I had thought maybe the SD card slot was bad, but I did a test yesterday. I booted into Safe Mode. SD card NEVER unmounts. I used burst mode on the camera and took 99 pictures, all written to the SD card. Not one unmount. I boot back into normal mode, immediately my SD card unmounts. If I wait, it will remount but sometimes it takes 30 minutes or more. When it was mounted, I again started taking pictures in burst mode and after about 20 pictures, it unmounted.

I've used old and new sd cards (found a new SD card package at work that I had ship in with some equipment so I tested with it). Same issue. Normal mode keeps unmounting my card. Safe mode, no problems.

I called Verizon yesterday and they stated they have other reports of people experiencing the same issue as me after taking the 49A OTA. They then got me patched into LG support and guess what? LG said that I could send the phone in and they could repair it and I would have to pay the repair costs since my phone was out of warranty. I told them that this issue was due to their official OTA they sent out and not through my fault. They said they were sorry, but since the phone is out of warranty, they can't fix it for free. I then stated that it's okay for them to send out OTAs to phones out of warranty and break them, but it's not okay to fix them free-of-charge from said breakage? They to me didn't seem right. She had no answer other than another apology. I told her at that point that I was through with LG products and that this was poor customer service. I stated I could understand if I did something to modify my phone (flash custom ROMs, dropped it, etc), but in this case, I took an official update from LG and VZW because it was a security update to make my phone more secure. Therefore, this was done via official channels, and therefore, since they broke it, I shouldn't have to pay for it. Same goes for if I take a car in for repairs due to some recall of the manufacturer. if they break something in the process of doing the recall repair, I shouldn't have to pay for that breakage. That was done by the dealer by their own fault. Same goes for this issue. Didn't matter. Another apology.

I'm waiting for VZW to see if they can come up with a solution other than having to be in safe mode. This stinks because I feel that the G3 is probably the best Android phone I have owned. I don't even want to give it up because it does exactly what I need and I'm not in the market for a new phone.

So, whether it gets fixed or not, I'll live with the phone the way it is where I can't use an SD card anymore. It sucks as it means I won't have access to all my music, but in hind sight, of that 40gb of music, I didn't listen to all of it all the time. Problem is, I love trance and I have over 16gb of trance that I do listen to via a playlist. I won't be able to store all of that on my internal memory and I don't stream because I don't have an unlimited plan.

So there's my story so far in this saga. I'll update it when/if I get more information. Hopefully, VZW will come through and get this fixed.
 
Update from last post: things are bad. SD card constantly gets unmounted no matter what under any version now. I had thought maybe the SD card slot was bad, but I did a test yesterday. I booted into Safe Mode. SD card NEVER unmounts. I used burst mode on the camera and took 99 pictures, all written to the SD card. Not one unmount. I boot back into normal mode, immediately my SD card unmounts. If I wait, it will remount but sometimes it takes 30 minutes or more. When it was mounted, I again started taking pictures in burst mode and after about 20 pictures, it unmounted.

I've used old and new sd cards (found a new SD card package at work that I had ship in with some equipment so I tested with it). Same issue. Normal mode keeps unmounting my card. Safe mode, no problems.

I called Verizon yesterday and they stated they have other reports of people experiencing the same issue as me after taking the 49A OTA. They then got me patched into LG support and guess what? LG said that I could send the phone in and they could repair it and I would have to pay the repair costs since my phone was out of warranty. I told them that this issue was due to their official OTA they sent out and not through my fault. They said they were sorry, but since the phone is out of warranty, they can't fix it for free. I then stated that it's okay for them to send out OTAs to phones out of warranty and break them, but it's not okay to fix them free-of-charge from said breakage? They to me didn't seem right. She had no answer other than another apology. I told her at that point that I was through with LG products and that this was poor customer service. I stated I could understand if I did something to modify my phone (flash custom ROMs, dropped it, etc), but in this case, I took an official update from LG and VZW because it was a security update to make my phone more secure. Therefore, this was done via official channels, and therefore, since they broke it, I shouldn't have to pay for it. Same goes for if I take a car in for repairs due to some recall of the manufacturer. if they break something in the process of doing the recall repair, I shouldn't have to pay for that breakage. That was done by the dealer by their own fault. Same goes for this issue. Didn't matter. Another apology.

I'm waiting for VZW to see if they can come up with a solution other than having to be in safe mode. This stinks because I feel that the G3 is probably the best Android phone I have owned. I don't even want to give it up because it does exactly what I need and I'm not in the market for a new phone.

So, whether it gets fixed or not, I'll live with the phone the way it is where I can't use an SD card anymore. It sucks as it means I won't have access to all my music, but in hind sight, of that 40gb of music, I didn't listen to all of it all the time. Problem is, I love trance and I have over 16gb of trance that I do listen to via a playlist. I won't be able to store all of that on my internal memory and I don't stream because I don't have an unlimited plan.

So there's my story so far in this saga. I'll update it when/if I get more information. Hopefully, VZW will come through and get this fixed.

bro did you try to format the SD card to fat 32 or something android likes?
 
The phone completely died a few days after my last post. So, it has been given a proper burial (had just gone off contract), so I'm now on a Samsung Galaxy S7 and loving it.

Still, I'm going to miss my G3. It was an excellent phone while I had it for two years.
 
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