Nomad of Norad
Newbie
Okay, a bit of a back story here...
Some while back, I had imported a handful of ringtones onto my Android phone, moved over from my Windows machine via USB cable, and then I set some of my contacts to use one of those ringtones. Some while since then, I was running out of storage space on my phone, so I placed onto my phone a name brand, higher-grade SD card that I had bought at... I want to say Walmart, but its been awhile. I then installed an app called Files To SD Card and used that to move as much from the internal storage over to the larger SD card. That seemed to solve the problem, but now I'm back to the built in memory being almost full.
Anyway, today I was trying to track down why those ringtones were no longer showing up as set for those particular contacts, the contacts had all reverted to the default ringer. I tried to set the ringer back to one or the other of the imported ringtones, but then discovered it wasn't listing ANY of the ringtones I'd installed, just the came-with-the-phone ones. I then did a bit of poking around online to determine what might have happened.
Anyway, for some reason the ringtones are in the root dir of the SD card, which isn't really an issue I suppose, but I discovered that somehow a .nomedia file had been placed into the root... which, well, it's not supposed to be THERE far as I understand it, but clearly this .nomedia file was what was preventing the ringtones from being seen by the system. I said to myself, "Okay, I'll just go delete that from Windows" and I plugged the phone in via USB, selected the .nomedia file and invoked delete. And it then complained that it couldn't complete this action because of write-protection, please turn the write protection off and try again. I wasn't really sure if this was referring to the file, or to the SD card. In any event, I tried to delete the .nomedia file via the phone itself, and that failed too. This is both using the My Files app (with the showing of hidden files enabled) provided by Samsung, and using ES File Explorer, installed today. Both TRY to remove the file, but then give a message saying it failed.
In any event, to determine once and for all if this was the FILE that was write protected, or the MEDIA that was, I decided to try copying a text file named Testing 123.txt over from the PC to the phone, and of course, that failed too.
I have made no changes to the SD card, and it hasn't been out of the phone since I originally installed it, so it isn't a case of me (or someone else? Oo) having pulled it out and changed a write-protect tab on it or something. On one forum post I came across while trying to track the problem down, describing the same cannot-delete-.nomedia problem I was having, one of the comments was that not being able to delete it as "...a sign the SD card is in the first stages of failing." Wait.... whut...?!? oO
Where do I go from here? This is exasperating.
Some while back, I had imported a handful of ringtones onto my Android phone, moved over from my Windows machine via USB cable, and then I set some of my contacts to use one of those ringtones. Some while since then, I was running out of storage space on my phone, so I placed onto my phone a name brand, higher-grade SD card that I had bought at... I want to say Walmart, but its been awhile. I then installed an app called Files To SD Card and used that to move as much from the internal storage over to the larger SD card. That seemed to solve the problem, but now I'm back to the built in memory being almost full.
Anyway, today I was trying to track down why those ringtones were no longer showing up as set for those particular contacts, the contacts had all reverted to the default ringer. I tried to set the ringer back to one or the other of the imported ringtones, but then discovered it wasn't listing ANY of the ringtones I'd installed, just the came-with-the-phone ones. I then did a bit of poking around online to determine what might have happened.
Anyway, for some reason the ringtones are in the root dir of the SD card, which isn't really an issue I suppose, but I discovered that somehow a .nomedia file had been placed into the root... which, well, it's not supposed to be THERE far as I understand it, but clearly this .nomedia file was what was preventing the ringtones from being seen by the system. I said to myself, "Okay, I'll just go delete that from Windows" and I plugged the phone in via USB, selected the .nomedia file and invoked delete. And it then complained that it couldn't complete this action because of write-protection, please turn the write protection off and try again. I wasn't really sure if this was referring to the file, or to the SD card. In any event, I tried to delete the .nomedia file via the phone itself, and that failed too. This is both using the My Files app (with the showing of hidden files enabled) provided by Samsung, and using ES File Explorer, installed today. Both TRY to remove the file, but then give a message saying it failed.
In any event, to determine once and for all if this was the FILE that was write protected, or the MEDIA that was, I decided to try copying a text file named Testing 123.txt over from the PC to the phone, and of course, that failed too.
I have made no changes to the SD card, and it hasn't been out of the phone since I originally installed it, so it isn't a case of me (or someone else? Oo) having pulled it out and changed a write-protect tab on it or something. On one forum post I came across while trying to track the problem down, describing the same cannot-delete-.nomedia problem I was having, one of the comments was that not being able to delete it as "...a sign the SD card is in the first stages of failing." Wait.... whut...?!? oO
Where do I go from here? This is exasperating.