Help Storage experiences

[Unicorn512]

For those of us (like me) who moved directly from the D1 to D3, the new internal memory arrangement is taking a little time to get straight in my head. I hope others can benefit from my experience.

The D3 ships with 16GB of memory, but it seems to be carved up into 3 pieces.
1) program storage
2) pseudo SD card
3) pseudo CDROM

The first two (PGM Storage and pseudo SD card) are easy to understand but the pseudo CDROM was a little different.

Under Settings / Storage / Software Install Help
there is a pretty good explanation of what the pseudo CDROM is for (drivers for your PC) and what happens if you connect your D3 to a car USB cable without first disabling "Software Auto Install" (the pseudo CDROM gets removed!) AND you have to do this each time BEFORE you connect to your car USB!

Of course I had not read any of that before I connected my D3 to my car USB on the way home from the VZ store (I wanted to charge it) and of course the the drivers were gone. Fortunately they are available from Motorola online and I was able to install them easily enough once I figured out I needed them.

When I first tried to mount the D3 on my Win Vista laptop, the new hardware detector kicked in but never finished looking for the drivers. It never reported an error, but it never finished (I killed it after 5 hrs.)

My wife's D3 never got plugged into the car USB so it still has it's pseudo CDROM, but mine is gone. It's not clear to me if any storage was freed up when it was removed.

I also moved the 16GB microSD card from my D1 to the d3 and ordered a 32GB microSD card. When it comes in, I will transfer the 16GB card to my wife's D3 (she is not nearly the pack rat that I am) and use the 32GB one myself.

I have DiskUsage (from the market) installed and it does a good job of showing me what's in each storage location.

But I still don't have a good explanation for why I seemed to "run out" of app storage space until I uninstalled NOVA and the Let's Golf 2 applications (shipped with std D3 software load.) It looked like I still had plenty of space, but I reached a point where I could not install anything more until I removed them.

Now I am getting an error message from Win Vista every time I mount the D3. My PC thinks there might be a problem with the file system on the internal pseudo SD card and Win Vista wants to "scan and fix" the problem. The real microSd card has no such issue.

So far, I am declining the PC request, since the D3 is not reporting any problems (at least that I can see.)

Any thoughts about letting Win Vista "do it's thing" ??

I have spend a lot of time getting the software I want on the D3 loaded, and since I cannot run Titanium Backup (no root yet) I don't want to mess everything up.

I have adopted the practice of leaving the USB connection setting as "Charge only" by default, and only change it to "USB Mass storage" when I actually need to move some files, then I change it back before I unplug it. I don't know why they did not make that the default setting from VZ, since it would have saved my pseudo CDROM partition, but what the heck...

I am curious to see if others are encountering similar issues.

 

[Ricochet]

So, where should the pseudo CD ROM show up? In the "Files" browser? Or under Settings/Storage?

I'm guessing mine's been removed from numerous car chargings (although I did plug it into a PC first).

-L

 

[Unicorn512]

I only "see" the pseudo CDROM (on my wife's D3) when I plug in the USB cable and mount the mass storage.

When I look with the "files" function on both D3s I don't see anything about the CDROM space on either one.

When I look with Settings / Storage it's the same story. Both D3s look the same.

I also used ASTRO (from the market) to look and I can see more detail including a folder called CDROM, but they both look the same (directory is empty.)

I am sure that since I don't have ROOT access, I am not getting the whole picture...

 

[Ricochet]

Hmm, I have Astro but didn't try it. I'll have to dock when I get home & see if anything shows up.

Thanks,

 

[spunker88]

I tend to ignore that scan and fix prompt in Vista/7. Some older memory cards and flash drives give me that message every time even though I know they are fine. Maybe the file system is a bit fragmented, but I was always told that flash doesn't have fragmentation issues like HDDs do.

So you're saying that even though you have the virtual CDROM enabled, its not coming up? You can get Motohelper and drivers from the Motorola website:
USB and PC Charging Drivers - Motorola Mobility, Inc. USA

 

[Unicorn512]

I am glad to learn I am not the only one with a strange error msg I can ignore.

If I can find a way to get a good application backup (so a restore would not be too painful) I might consider letting Win Vista "scan and fix" the pseudo SD card just to see what would happen. I am missing Titanium Backup already..

Oh well, I guess there is a reason they call it the "bleeding" edge....