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Help Some problems, concerns, with the Triumph

T

thevaliantx

Member
I bought this phone just over a week ago at Best Buy, and it probably is a bit irrational for me to think this way, but I wanted a non-contract phone running Android so badly that I'm unwilling to return it to Best Buy despite the problems I'm having with it ... unless of course I my phone has a physical defect or something.

Upfront I should say that I got bored with the phone and rooted it 4-5 days ago, installed a bunch of crap on it and then the phone became very sluggish. It got to the phone where I couldn't even uninstall Android programs I didn't want.

Then, the other night the phone just started freezing up. I could barely navigate to different menus without having to wait 30 seconds or more. So, I did a factory reset (or at least I think I did). The phone, in its seemingly bare, pure state again, seemed to be snappy and able to pick up on things like it being connected via USB to my Linux Mint computer (just a couple of hours ago I neither Mint or the phone could see each other again), and I could even uninstall programs with ease. Now I'm trying to uninstall various programs and the phone seems stuck in the "Uninstalling" phase. When I go back to the main screen there isn't an icon at the top of the phone indicating that it's connected via USB (though it is). When I try to view the contents of the SD card from the "Manage Applications" screen it only shows one program on there and just below the program's name is "Computing...". There is a lot of stuff on that SD card, but the phone disagrees.
When I go to the SD card & phone storage settings and click on "Unmount SD card", nothing happens. The option for "Format SD card" is grayed out. Weird.

What has gone wrong with my phone? Did I royally screw something up in it, or did I not really do a true factory reset of the phone? Why won't the phone recognize that it's connected via USB (cable that came with phone is connected to the phone and my laptop computer which has no problem recognizing the Geek Squad USB stick that's connected to it).

If there were a better Android phone in the non-contract market I'd buy it, until then I'd prefer to see the issues (or my errors) I'm having resolved. Anyone else seeing these issues?

I forgot to mention that I have started to see the "Preparing SD Card" message at the top of the phone and it doesn't go away.

After rebooting the phone several times, physically connected via USB to my Linux Mint laptop, the phone is finally indicating at the top of the screen that it's connected via USB. However, when I dragged the top bar down and selected "USB connected" to enable the USB connection, nothing happened. That particular option remains highlighted, there is no longer a USB symbol shown at the top of the phone, and I can not see the device from within Linux Mint. Is the phone bricked or something? Could the phone be overheating?

So, these are the issues I'm currently having (some were not mentioned above):

* phone seems to freeze at random times. Sometimes nothing in the phone works, other times it's just certain screens where nothing happens when I press anything

* unable to uninstall any programs previously installed, The (un) installation process hangs.

* volume at times is really low

* wi-fi randomly becomes unselected and I have to go back in and select it

* "Preparing SD Card" message randomly appears at top of phone and doesn't go away

* am currently unable to access the contents of the SD card

* have never been able to "unmount the SD card", the process always hangs

* starting the past couple of days I am unable to connect via USB to the phone.
 
Sounds like the SD card is going bad. That would explain all of the problems you are seeing, actually. Do you have another microSD card you can try with the phone?
 
I did not realize that an SD card could badly this quick. In looking at some sites last night others are saying that the Triumph comes shipped with a crappy SD card, is that true???
 
No form of recovery is going to work if USB isn't working on the phone. At this point I have no ability to get anything onto the SD card, though I can charge the phone. It sounds like, at a minimum, I need to go out and buy an SD card.

I can't help but wonder if, in the process of doing all that stuff (gingerbreak, etc) with the phone, that I didn't mess up something in the firmware.

Also, I'm wondering there is something damaged in the USB connection port, in terms of the phone being able to receive a charge but not able to receive data (if that makes any sense).
 
someguy43210 said:
Why dont you do a stock recovery (http://androidforums.com/triumph-al...100-stock-nandroid-backup-stock-recovery.html) as these issues are software related. Also do a disk check on your sd card as I got data corruption with Android before.

PS. ofcourse the free sd is crappy, but I still say stock recovery.
Click to expand...

Please tell me how to do a disk check on the SD card.

Please tell me how to get Mint to recognize the device, when it recognizes my wife's phone with no problem. Thanks.
 
thevaliantx said:
No form of recovery is going to work if USB isn't working on the phone. At this point I have no ability to get anything onto the SD card, though I can charge the phone. It sounds like, at a minimum, I need to go out and buy an SD card.

I can't help but wonder if, in the process of doing all that stuff (gingerbreak, etc) with the phone, that I didn't mess up something in the firmware.

Also, I'm wondering there is something damaged in the USB connection port, in terms of the phone being able to receive a charge but not able to receive data (if that makes any sense).
Click to expand...

You can perform a recovery directly from the phone by booting into the recovery menu,just rooting the phone should not effect the recovery.
 
If by "recovery" you mean doing a wipe of the user data from the recovery menu, then this phone is literally messed up. I've done that wipe several times now, including wiping the cache, and no dice.

Also, I do not see how a malfunct (which we don't that the SD card on my phone is) SD card would affect USB. The SD card is considered 'external' memory. The phone obviously can receive a charge via USB.

I'm thinking that either the hardware is messed up or that the ROM itself (which would be loaded into memory, yes?) is corrupted to the point that the phone is unable to communicate via USB. It's like feeding 95 year old Grandma. She can open her mouth, accept the pureed rice pudding, she just can't communicate that it tastes like crap.
 
I would seriously consider grabbing a new SD card just to test the situation. As someone had already suggested, nearly every problem you are facing could in fact be due to the bad SD card.

One thing to remember, every time you plug the phone into the computer via USB, the connectivity of the SD card to the phone is broken until the USB cable is unplugged, so yeah, there is something there that is potentially affiliated.
 
KryptoNyte said:
One thing to remember, every time you plug the phone into the computer via USB, the connectivity of the SD card to the phone is broken until the USB cable is unplugged, so yeah, there is something there that is potentially affiliated.
Click to expand...

Okay, technically, this isn't totally correct. Every time you plug the phone into the computer AND attempt to mount the SD card as a USB drive, the phone loses access to the SD card. Sorry about that ...

I still think the SD card issue is worth investigating.
 
Just bought a 16GB PNY card and all is good. I will post back if things change. But for now I've accessed the card from Linux Mint, formatted it and created some folders in there.

EDIT: Still working great! I'm thoroughly convinced the 2gb SD card that came with it was of inferior quality. From day one of purchase it seemed slow to do anything. And, I know that I did not fry the thing because I have a little bit of an IT background and have taken computer / electronic courses that go over things like ESD.
 
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