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Windows not showing folders on phone

A

Albro

Lurker
I've searched here and elsewhere but cannot find any reference to the particular problem I have. When I connect my phone to my PC, the phone displays the message "Connected as a media device" but Windows 7 no longer asks me what I want to do. I can find the phone in Explorer but it doesn't show me the folders on either the phone or the SD card. Until yesterday, it was all working fine.
My partner has the same phone and it is connecting to the PC without any problem so it looks like an issue with my phone. I have tried setting USB debugging on and off, unmounting and re-mounting the SD card, rebooting phone and PC, etc. to no avail. If I use the USB Mass storage approach to connecting the storage, the PC correctly sees the phone and card and I can copy files successfully between them.
I am running ICS, 4.0.3 on a Samsung Galaxy S2.
Any suggestions would be very welcome as the only possible solution I can see at the moment is to return to manufacturer's original settings and incur the pain that would bring.
 
Try a different USB Port on the PC. It will force the PC to "re-discover" the phone.

Make sure you are using the Samsung cable, too. Samsung phones tend to be very fussy about cables.
 
Thanks for the responses. I tried a different USB port which worked immediately but then failed the next time I plugged in the phone. :(.

Have also tried uninstalling the driver and plugging in again forcing a re-install.

Playing with USB debugging has no notable effect.
 
Do you have Kies and when you do get connected, do you get the MTP connection on the phone?

Maybe install the latest version of Kies to get the latest drivers?
 
Yes I have Kies and have installed the latest version. Made no difference to my problem although Kies now exits with an error! Partner's pohone still works as it should. When I connect, I get the message 'Connected as a Media device".
 
LATEST UPDATE:
Kies suddenly stopped recognising my device even after re-booting everything. So I tried the Diagnose Connection problem option. After re-loading the device driver, Kies recognised the device but then screwed up my contacts by duplicating many of them. It looked like it duplicated any where I didn't have a person's name - just a company but unfortunately duplicated entries with addresses had the address corrupted! I also discovered that the majority of other entries had addresses corrupted in Outlook - generally showing only the first line. This didn't apply to every entry so a few were OK. However, the full entries were still on my phone. That was good because I hadn't lost anything but somehow I thought the idea of synchronisation was that both the device and the PC ended up with the same information. Silly me!

So I had to check each one manually. All sorted for the moment. And guess what? Windows is again asking me what I want to do and I can see all my folders. But I am now keeping backup copies of outlook.pst and also exporting my data to Excel so I have several ways to recover my data when (no not if) KIES screws it all up again.

It's all a bit of a mystery to me but confirmation that too many bugs remain for comfort. It wouldn't be so bad if there was consistency and a workaround but each time there's a similar problem the detail is slightly different and the fix, if there is one, is also different.

What fun!!
 
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