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Missing SD card

D

Darkflame1

Member
My SD card is missing - it is no longer visible to my phone.
I have removed and reinstalled it, rebooted my phone, even erased the contacts (rubbed them with an eraser, not deleting them).
It still does not recognize the card.
I gotta get this fixed. Suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Than you,

David

San Antonio, TX
 
Have to wonder if this problem is with the microSD card slot or with the card itself. If you have access to another card and it's detected properly by your phone that would indicate the problem is the card. If you have another mobile device with a card slot or a computer with a microSD card adapter or integral card slot you should try to see if that card mounts properly.
 
svim,
I failed to mention that I had I plugged the card into the reader on my PC, and it read it perfectly. I am currently backing it up to a drive.
That seems to indicate that the trouble is in the phone.
To that end, I have reseated it several times, making sure to use a flat surface because the teeny tiny tray is so flimsy that touching the SIM or the SD card causes the other to pop out - but this has always been its usual behavior (popping out).
I wish I knew when this happened. I rarely use the SD, except for photos and a few documents I have to have ready. I guess it has been quite a while since it got lost by the phone. Judging by a couple  of files dates, looks like 7/23 last year.
I grabbed my digital camera & pulled the micro card out of it and the spare from the bags pocket. Report coming shortly.
 
The camera card reads fine in the phone.
Oh, joy. My phone and SD card do not talk, but the SD card talks to other devices and my phone talks to other SD cards.
How does THAT happen???
As soon as the files are finished being copied off the original card, I'm going to format it and see it the phone  will read it then ... unless there are other suggestions?
 
I'm out of ideas, you're already ahead of whatever I might have suggested. As the card is detected and readable by your computer that's a good sign, please post what happens after you re-format the card.
 
I will post results when done.
The card reader to my external sata desktop port says it will be finished copying in 2 days 😢
I'm stopping it and just copying the pics. Everything else is expendable.
Update coming,maybe not soon, but when done.
 
Well, maybe it was the card. I managed to copy all the pics from my DCIM folder, no problem. But, I am pretty sure the process froze up after that.  I had maybe 100 photos in the cards root directory, but even doing a drag-&-drop of just a single file froze it up. Each time it froze, I cancelled the process, clicked the eject option, rebooted the pc & tried again. I even tried to open a pic in the root directory, only to have it freeze. The interesting thing is that after freezing, when it came back alive, it showed the folders in the left panel, but the right panel said 'no files found.' So, maybe the card IS corrupted.
I am an old computer geek that started learning about computers by writing an assembler (the program that translates the computer program to 0s & 1s & was written in what the professors called 'pseudocode,' & was written on punch cards that were fed into the computer via a card reader (not anything like the (SD) card reader on my PC, but were as big as our smaller bathroom. I say this to explain that I understand that the directory (the listing of a folders table of contents) is like the table of contents in a book - you can tear out whole chapters from the book, but the TOC still shows the chapter is present. The directory is just a bunch of pointers. When one deletes a file, it does not delete the actual file, it just erases the TOC entry for the file. Unless overwritten, the deleted file is still intact on the drive. That's why a 'secure' delete rewrites 0s on all the space indicated by the TOC.
That was a dinosaurs geeky way of explaining what can happen when a file, folder, or disk is corrupted. A reformat can fix that (it erases everything and starts the TOC & contents from scratch), as long as there is no physical damage. And, a magnet can corrupt a disk, too.
So, I will give it another shot tomorrow before I resort to the format process.
 
Memory cards can be hit or miss with different devices, always have been, at least for me. They're cheap, buy a new one and be glad you've been able to retrieve most if not all of your data.
 
This is not a new card. It was the one I had in my Galaxy S4. And, it worked flawlessly in my S8+ for half of 2017. As for losing data, the only thing in it that originated from my phone was pictures. Everything else, my music and the documents I keep for reference, was transferred from my computer. As for cheap, when your wife is about to have her 4th major back surgery in < 12 months, and your insurance deductible reset at a rate $2000 more than last year, and the deep freeze died taking about $2000 worth of food with it, even a $1.29 hamburger ar Wendys is too expensive for my budget. If I do have to replace it, I'm tossing that 64gb microdisk with an 8gb one from my camera, and I can do without any of the music library I copied from my pc.
Sorry, I'm not copping a 'tude, but this is just another straw on this camels back.
 
OK, maybe you should have bought a cheaper phone???? Or just do without the card until the finances recover. Focus on what's important.

You asked for help and I was just telling that memory cards can be finicky. That card may work "forever" in another device and never again in your phone.
 
One thing to keep in mind as you're grappling with that microSD card is it's using a FAT variation for its file system (FAT32 or possibly exFAT if it's a larger capacity card -- recall the 4GB file size limitation for FAT32). FAT, and its variations, being dated, no longer actively supported, and questionably reliable even in its day, is constant weak point that's not going away any time soon. It's one plus point is it's supported by multiple file systems. Adding to its list of annoyances, which may be the most relative factor to what's going on while trying to copy off everything, is that FAT also has an inherent problem with supporting things like metadata and file/folder attributes. Also, your phone is running Android, itself based on a Linux kernel, and relies on ext4 as its default file system. Data transfer to and from the card is always a matter of compromises as FAT just isn't robust enough. (... on a different tangent, just for loose context, if your card was formatted as 'adaptable' it would be changed to ext4, making it in parity with your internal storage, but between that and it also gets encrypted would mean you couldn't just remove it to copy files back and forth on a computer.)
 
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