When I boot into recovery prior to flashing a Rom, I notice the option to format the SD Card, but I am not sure when it is a good idea to do so. Thanks for your replies.
The average user will probably never use it.
Over time the card will fill with meaningless junk files from things you've installed to scripts you've ran and can cause problems (yes it happens).
I'd guess it's mostly there for those that partition though.
The only time I've ever formatted an SD card was when I was selling someone a device with the SD card included. If you do format it, for whatever reason, make sure you back your files up(pictures, music, etc) to your PC.
Edit: Now that I think about it, I had to format an SD card in my Droid 1 when the apps2sd partition tanked and started corrupting files on the SD card.
Sent from my ADR6400L using XDA App
That makes sense, thanks for your prompt replies.
Related
Today I've run into a curious problem, and I've finally ran into a brick wall in solving it.
I have the Samsung galaxy S II Skyrocket, and I have a 16GB micro SD card that I just bought from wal-mart for it. The card has been awesome since I got it.
Earlier I was cleaning up stuff because I was running out of space, so I moved a bunch of stuff from the SD card to my laptop and deleted it off my sd card. When I went to move my stuff back over after having made my changes to it... the sdcard said it only had 5GB of memory left. That's weird, because I had just moved 10GB worth of stuff off of the sdcard. So something must be up.
I rebooted my phone and wiped the caches just to make sure it wasn't keeping stuff like that on it. I also got rid of the LOST.DIR folder. I would go through the whole card in Ubuntu terminal using ls -lh on every folder and there was no way that card only had 5GB of free space on it. So I went ahead and reformatted it.
This is where things went wrong.
Foolish me, and this was a mistake on my part, I chose ext 4 for whatever reason as opposed to FAT32. So now I have a 16gb sdcard that is blank and unreadable by my phone. My phone offers to format it, but the format does nothing. Formatting it in CWM also accomplishes nothing. And my other machines won't recognize the Sd card either, only my phone. My phone could see it, but say that it can't use it. Sdcard is blank or has an unsupported filesystem would be the error.
At least my phone could see it though, so I thought there must be a way to save this thing. My laptop couldn't recognize it for some reason, so using Gparted was out of the question.
After a couple attempted reformats and searching for apps that could format sd cards (I couldn't seem to find any) I went for a last ditch attempt and used the partition tool in CWM that I had read about some weeks ago for a completely unrelated task.
And voila I can see the card again. Except.. CWM partitioned 4GB, and those 4GB of data seem to be lost. No matter what, using windows, my phone, Gparted in ubuntu, they all say that the card has a max size of 10.7GB now as opposed to the 14.7 or so that it was supposed to have.
And now I'm stumped. Did CWM goof up and instead of partitioning off 4GB, it actually just destroyed 4GB and somehow made the sdcard work again at the cost of 25% of the data it is supposed to hold? Or is the way CWM partitions it something whacky where the 4GB is there but it is impossible to see it or access it or something..
tl;dr SD card had issues, repartitioning in CWM made it work again. Instead of having 16GB, it has 12GB. How to get those 4GB back?
So I have an Hboot 1.15 CM10 Nightly installed on my evo, but i cannot access the SD card. Whenever I try to download something, it says I need external storage to download it, or even if I do a transfer from my computer to the SD card, I cannot see the sd card folder in TWRP to install gapps.
Is there any way to use my internal storage, or reconfigure my sdcard? Everything else works fine, but just really having trouble with this.
Ps. forgot to mention, I have S-ON, so maybe that is the problem?
midfieldmaestro said:
So I have an Hboot 1.15 CM10 Nightly installed on my evo, but i cannot access the SD card. Whenever I try to download something, it says I need external storage to download it, or even if I do a transfer from my computer to the SD card, I cannot see the sd card folder in TWRP to install gapps.
Is there any way to use my internal storage, or reconfigure my sdcard? Everything else works fine, but just really having trouble with this.
Ps. forgot to mention, I have S-ON, so maybe that is the problem?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The only problem with s-on is that you dont have full access to nand. Its not that big a deal considering there are plenty of ways to flash with s-on, just a few extra steps. Anyway did you wipe the phone prior to flashing cm10, you can either use a wipe script or you can manualy wipe by going to factory reset, cache and dalvik cache. When moving from a different rom, especially sense to aosp you need to wipe the phone to get rid of anything left over that could cause problems. There is also a zip that was recently posted that will re-write the locations for internal and external sd, I flashed it but Im only seeing the external sd now, still it helps that my external is better recognized
om4 said:
The only problem with s-on is that you dont have full access to nand. Its not that big a deal considering there are plenty of ways to flash with s-on, just a few extra steps. Anyway did you wipe the phone prior to flashing cm10, you can either use a wipe script or you can manualy wipe by going to factory reset, cache and dalvik cache. When moving from a different rom, especially sense to aosp you need to wipe the phone to get rid of anything left over that could cause problems. There is also a zip that was recently posted that will re-write the locations for internal and external sd, I flashed it but Im only seeing the external sd now, still it helps that my external is better recognized
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yea everything was wiped. What I ended up doing was mounting the SD card from TWRP and for some reason it was able to detect it then. So now I am able to use the stock google apps, but I still can't use the camera, because it requires the SD card, so something fishy is going on with recognition of it. I highly doubt its a corrupt memory card because I just went out and bought it. (its a 16 gb class 10 SDHC sandisk card).
midfieldmaestro said:
Yea everything was wiped. What I ended up doing was mounting the SD card from TWRP and for some reason it was able to detect it then. So now I am able to use the stock google apps, but I still can't use the camera, because it requires the SD card, so something fishy is going on with recognition of it. I highly doubt its a corrupt memory card because I just went out and bought it. (its a 16 gb class 10 SDHC sandisk card).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
idk im on cm10 with a 64gb class 10 and it sees it fine.
ah..i cant believe that slipped my mind, the latest TWRP does support both cards, if you dont mind somewhat crippling the filesystem, you can flash that zip i was talking about earlier, it goes into the filesystem and erases the shortcuts for the internal and external sd and then rewrites them, i only had partial acces to my external the first time and after flashing i seem to be somewhat locked out of my internal (file explorer will not venture outside external sd) but the rom seems to run happily now
om4 said:
ah..i cant believe that slipped my mind, the latest TWRP does support both cards, if you dont mind somewhat crippling the filesystem, you can flash that zip i was talking about earlier, it goes into the filesystem and erases the shortcuts for the internal and external sd and then rewrites them, i only had partial acces to my external the first time and after flashing i seem to be somewhat locked out of my internal (file explorer will not venture outside external sd) but the rom seems to run happily now
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I will look into it, is there any way to switch the camera to use internal storage without going to the camera app? Whenever I do go to camera, it just pops up and asks for an external memory card
Maybe my card is formatted wrong? Is there a special way to format the card so I can use it?
well it may be that cm10 does not like the way your card is formatted but if it has no access to the card at all then formatting it will not help. Are you on the latest nightly? There are some issues with the sd cards but I havent had CM10 flat out refuse my sd card. Since TWRP can read and write to both cards you can try rebooting into recovery and reformat (wipe) the card, be sure any backups may have you have are safe
Help!
I moved to GS2 and wanted to use my SD card I used on another phone; it had an ext4 partition and a FAT32 partition.
All went well.
Then I decided to remove the ext4 partition and have the SD fully formatted with FAT32. I tried both Primary and Logical, tried NTFS too and even recreated and ext partition with ClockwordMod, but I end up always the same way, that is if I put the card in the phone and then boot, it freezes, terminate processes and does not see ANY internal or external SD card!!
Please help! How can I get back to a working full FAT32/NTFS card?
Thank you!!!
Dude looks like you have really messed up not only your phone, but also the way you put your problem. How is it possible that you boot up your phone and still you cant see at least your internal SD... Anyhow my suggestions are:-
1. Remove SD card and boot normally without SD card. See if your internal shows up. If YES, format the SD card in PC and put back in cell.
2. If the phone still crashes, you need to clear all caches in Recovery. Do and see what happens. Also tell us if you are rooted? what ROM are you using..
3. Apart from the SD, does your phone work normal?
Bro, your query is kinda too complex and one of the noobiest one i have come upon in a long time.
Sorry for not having said before: without the SD the phone boots normally. AND however I format the SD card, is it always readable in Windows 7.
About your question "How is it possible that you boot up your phone and still you cant see at least your internal SD", it is what I'm wandering too... It looks like the "badly" formatted SD messes the partition logic in Android.
Now I'm trying this: deleted all partitions, created a new unformatted one trying to format within phone.
Thanks for help and patience!
Yes! It worked!! The phone saw the unformatted card and prompted for action; I made it format and now it's back
Where are the kernel files to the phone located?
I'm trying to format my whole SD card, everything. So all my unused directories or extra files don't take up room or interfere with system files/functions. But I want to make sure I'll have a functional kernel afterwards to reflash a rom. Whats the best way to go about xleaning your whole phones internal SD card?
Just do a wipe/factory reset.
i_Son said:
Just do a wipe/factory reset.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No you dont understand, there's a ton of made, unnessisary files that are on the general SD card directory. I want to wipe the phone completely from an external OS (windows), and restart the installation process. I have a 12gb SD card, with only 4gbs to spare and I have no idea where all the rest of the data is going. Jellybean shouldnt take less than just 1gb or so!
Didn't your micro SD card come with an adapter? Just remove it, put in the adapter, reformat the card and put it back in the phone? Are you wanting to wipe the internal SD card (the virtual one that came with the phone)? If so, I don't think you can just wipe it externally as there are some files on it that are created by the ROM and needed to function. If you are going to do a ROM flash they will be recreated. If you have a backup of your app data you should be OK. The kernel is stored in the protected OS area and would not be affected so long as you don't delete any sys or system stuff.
In Recovery, I believe you can format both external uSD and internal SD (which I prefer calling "internal memory space")
You can format system, data, external, cache...
Sent from my i777 using xda app-developers app
New phone
SO i don't know where all my extra disk space was going but i got a brand new phone from my warranty, updated the rom to the same ****. Restored everything and now i have an extra 9gb left opposed to 2gb left. Huge difference. Where the hell was the disk space going though?
Only way to know is an app called DiskUsage.
Very helpful on that situation.
Sorry for didn't mention that before.
Sent from my SGH-I777 using xda app-developers app
I have a S9+. I've had it almost a year now. But I never put an SD card in it until recently. So I was trying to move some stuff over to the SD card to make space on my phone.
Well I moved my music and 1 app but now anything I try to move, it says that there is not enough space. Yet when I look it says only 1GB is used out of 29GB. So why is it telling me there is not enuff space??
Any help is appreciated. Thanks
Don't know. Could try reformating sd card in windows or on phone. Backup sd card first if need be.
Whenever I bought new sdcard, I always tested on laptop to copy 80% capacity to it. There're many counterfeit, I just can't risk dumping valuable files on it. Try copying 25GB random files from laptop.
Reply
I have used the card in previous phones and it worked fine. I did format before using in my new phone.
MissLaniS said:
I have used the card in previous phones and it worked fine. I did format before using in my new phone.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
format it again using the long method in windows. ive never seen this issue in any phone that wasnt related to a dead sd card. if at first youre fricasseed, fry fry a hen