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Help Phone internal storage not displayed when connected to PC

mcp111

Lurker
When I connect my android phone to PC, it does not show Internal Storage in Explorer. ONly SD card
Why???
I want to back up my phone before doing a software update.
 
What phone do you have, what OS version is it running, and have you formatted the SD card as internal storage?

Also, has it worked previously or is this the first time you've tried?
 
I have a Lenovo Vibe K5 Note running Android Marshmallow 6.0
SD card is formatted as internal storage
It used to work previously. It would show both "Internal Storage" and "SD Card" in Explorer
 
Out of curiosity, was it before you formatted the SD as internal that it used to work?

I ask because I've seen other people report that they formatted the card as internal and then could only see the card over a USB connection and not the true internal storage. As my phone doesn't have an SD slot, my tablet is running Android 5.1, and I've anyway no desire to format a card as internal, I cannot test this myself or investigate why, but it is something I've read before.

You are sure that it's not showing any of the internal directories, i.e. it's not just showing both stores as a single volume and labelling it SD? Otherwise unless someone knows an answer I'd start looking at workarounds, e.g. whether something like WiFi File Explorer or Airdroid can be used to back up over WiFi, or whether a flash drive and a USB OTG adapter could be used to do the backup from the phone itself.

(Of course if the update is an over the air one, the risk of data loss is very small. Different if you are manually reflashing the phone).
 
I think maybe it was before I formatted SD card as internal storage. I needed to format SD card as internal storage so I could move apps there using App2SD
BUt why should that prevent internal storage from being seen?
It's not showing both volumes as SD, only the SD card contents
Internal storage contents are not shown at all
I want to update the latest software using Settings/About Phone
Are you saying I don't need to backup my phone for that?
 
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