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Stuck sd tray

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Dave012345678910

Well-Known Member
The Moto G Play's SD card tray is stuck, and I mean tight. It almost seems glued in there. The phone was not working for a while, not even charging, and I wanted to get the SD out of it. I tried that weird paper clip thing. Then I got some distilled water on a clothy paper towel. After that it was sticky tape. I eventually used a little WD40. Now the phone is charging, up to 54% after hours and hours, with a new charge cord, but the tray is still stuck and the SD is not showing.
 

moto g play - User Guide (HTML)| Motorola Support US

Visit the customer support page to view user guides, FAQs, bluetooth pairing, software downloads, drivers, tutorials and to get repair and contact us information.moto g play - User Guide (HTML)
en-us.support.motorola.com en-us.support.motorola.com

Normally the SD card tray should not require all that much effort to insert or to eject. Water? Sticky tape? WD-40? All things that should not be used in that way. Either the tray mechanism did fail or you inadvertently installed a microSD card the wrong side up and forced the tray into place.
At this point your phone might be compromised with its internals being intentionally exposed to things like water and WD-40. It might be better to send your phone to a service center to get thoroughly checked out, and manually extract the card tray. Hopefully the slot itself isn't physically damaged.
 
Yeah, I've used the weird little tool. It didn't work. It is really stuck. I probably couldn't afford to have somebody fix it. As far as I know any place would just sell phones and not know anything about repairing them.
 
Do you have UBreakIFix locations in your town? they have techs trained in tear down 'n rebuild to repair every type of device. They could likely pull the case apart and dislodge the SD card from inside.

Anecdote: I had to use them once a few years ago when my wife dropped her Samsung (...it was brand new🤢) faceplanted on a pebble and broke that glass - it looked like a bullet hole. Anyway, they were able to do a one day repair to replace the glass screen and also did a refresh on the battery even though the phone was only 6 weeks old. It wasn't cheap but was a fraction of the cost of a new phone, and we've kept that phone another 3+ years.
Well worth it.
 
Here in the UK I see "phone repair" shops in many cities I visit. No idea what they charge or how good they are.

But yeah, I'm afraid I agree with @svim's diagnosis: either something's broken or the card was not seated properly in the tray and is now jamming the slot - my money is on the latter. The trouble is that unless you can just shake the card into place somehow (which would be very lucky indeed!) I can't imagine any way of getting the card out without dismantling the phone: it's not like you can slide something in to push the card out of the way because the end of the tray is wider than the slot and seals against the body of the phone.
 
If sending your phone out to be checked over/repaired isn't doable, you don't have a lot of options.
-- You can continue using your phone as is, taking into account that jammed SD card/slot as a given. Hopefully you don't need to change carriers nor add extra storage space. When you squirted things like water and WD-40 inside the slot opening, that is a bad practice. Moisture and solvent/lube doesn't mix well with electronics so keep an eye on your phone's overall performance.
-- As for the jammed slot/tray, it really shouldn't require a lot of effort to eject or insert the tray into the slot. Depending if you're comfortable tearing down a smartphone, you could try to opening your phone's back cover, disassembling it a bit, and see if you can access the SD card slot from an internal aspect. Not knowing if you have a 2021, a 2023, or a 2024 version of Moto G Play phone, you might find a matching guide for your model. As an example, the iFixit site has a helpful, step-by-step guide to remove the back cover of a 2021model:
www.ifixit.com

Motorola Moto G Play (2021) Motherboard Cover Replacement

Follow this guide to gain access to the motherboard in your 2021 Motorola Moto G Play.
www.ifixit.com www.ifixit.com
The card slot is under the removed motherboard so you might be able to manually free up the microSD card.
With the slot exposed, you might note that there are a row of metal contacts in just one side. On any microSD card, there's also a row of corresponding metal contacts. When the card is properly installed, the contacts on the card line up with the contacts in the slot. If you look at a microSD card, it has a unique shape with a bulge on only one side, so its metal contacts can only be oriented one way. The card tray has that exact same, matching shape to hold the card. So there's only one way for you to put a card into the slot, and card with slot are more or less flat. If you don't put the card into the tray properly, that creates a bulge and forcing the mismatched assembly into the slot is a resulting problem.
 
I've got some good news. After 2 reboots the SD card showed up and it's been working ever since. The phone's charging is not that great, sometimes turbo and others nothing. Rebooting makes it charge, I guess. I have another question about a brand new phone. When I thought the Play wasn't going to work at all, I got a Moto G Stylus. I thought they were always 128 GB, but this is 64. I haven't used it yet because I want to set it up right. I was planning to use the Play's SD for that, but I figure I better not mess with it. There are some apps I wanted to put on SD and put that in the new phone. I can't do that now. Is there some way I could use Bluetooth to send apps to the new phone? Would that be working already on a phone that's barely out of the box? The main thing I want to do is lock it down to keep google and Facebook and that kind of junk from taking over because it's defenseless. I guess I'll have to let it connect to WiFi, but if I could use SD, I wouldn't have to do that.
 
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