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SD Card Corruption Issue?

L

liquid_cow

Newbie
Hi there,

I believe there is a cross-platform problem with Android causing the SD card to become corrupted, specifically with photo/video files.

I'm wondering if anyone has any solid answers to this problem (it seems like all of the device sub threads have posts about this, but little in the way of answers).

Here's what's happening to my stock Droid X with the latest OTA

I start taking pictures and or video. Everything is fine till suddenly photos go missing. I'll take a photo and it will not save. If I stop here and reboot my phone I'm all set, but if I take another picture all hell breaks loose on the SD card. I'll go into the gallery and see that the last few photos have a blank thumb nail and show as 1Kb files.

If I put the SD card in my PC and run a check disk scan on it I get a "Windows has made corrections to the file system" message. Once repaired things work great again until some random point when it happens again. I can even leave the corrupted photo files on the card, the root of the problem is the file system corruption. If I take the extra step of formatting the SD card it seems to stay stable longer before the file system crashes. The problem seems to make other problems worse, most notably my battery life takes a dive when the problem occurs, and a format will literally double my battery life on standby.

This is my second Droid X with the exact same problem. The first time it happened I didn't know what was going on and the error got so bad that it destroyed by SD card (the stock one). After replacing the SD card the phone began to run great, battery life improved, very few slow downs or crashing programs, then the next time I noticed corrupted photo files the phone became temperamental again until I formatted the SD card again.

Its my belief there is something wrong with the software and I've run into a number of other people who have the same problem on a number of different Droid platforms. I see the problem in root threads as well as stock.
 
I would say this is more an issue with your microSD card.

Did it come with the phone or did you buy it? If you bought a cheap card from eBay then it's likely you have a fake. If it only happens once you've filled the card up a bit, you could have a card that's reporting itself as being a certain size when really it's nowhere near as big.
 
Never had that problem on Android, and I've used several cards. I do however buy the branded cards only though, at reputable stores.
 
PNY purchased via Best Buy. When it happened to the original card I thought (based on many comments about the quality of the cards Moto used) that it was a bad card. When it continued happening with my new SD card I thought it was a phone issue so I SBF'd my phone and got it warrantied. When it continued happening with the new phone I started asking questions.

As part of my troubleshooting I've tried stripping the phone to absolute stock as well as root and tried three different ROM's. Problem kept coming back.

Just a couple of weekends ago I met someone at a school who also had an X and saw him try to take a picture and start mumbling to the effect of "not this one too" at which point I introduced myself and described exactly what was happening with his phone, he was amazed that I knew what was going to. He thought it was a virus because his wife's phone was also doing the same thing. I told him to format the card and the next day he said it was working again.

More info: I've run two different anti virus' just to make sure that was not it. When the SD card is not in the phone it improves battery life. There are times when the phone will not be able to format the card (I suspect if I let the error go one too long) but the PC will format it via the USB cable.

The one thing which I have not done is gone back to Froyo to see if the problem continues.
 
I have the same issue with my droid x. I had problems with photos disappearing or not saving at all. The problem gets worse until programs and icons don't show up anymore as well. This started with my original 16GB SD card that came with the phone. I have since purchased and installed a new 32GB SD card. I have had issues where the phone won't see the card at all since installing that card but I can resolve them by power cycling the phone, sometimes it takes 2 or 3 power cycles. When I power it on I have to wait until I see the status icon for the SD Card and the message says "Preparing SD card". After the icon and message go away I still have to wait for several minutes before attempting to unlock the phone and start to use it or the SD card will have issues.

My phone is up to date OS wise and has never been rooted.

I have virus protection and is says everything is clean.

Is there a way to get rid of this issue permanently?

I don't want to format the SD card all the time to get rid of the issue.
 
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