That's a first, SD card failure.

So, my phone has been acting up for the last couple of weeks. Mostly slow, but also some app stoppage and not wanting to load pictures. I had shuffled some stuff from the phone to the SD card to free up some memory and it seemed to help for a while.

This afternoon it just locked up. I pulled the battery to reset it and it wouldn't load at all, so I set about trying to recover it. A little fiddling and I finally got it to load enough to get into the settings. Still no files, no cell and slow as molasses. Before I wiped it, I tried to get it to load the storage app, because I had some files and music I didn't want to loose. It would load the first menu, but if you selected the external SD the phone would lock up again. In the famous words of Felonius Gru, "Lightbulb!"

I pulled the battery and stuck in a 16G formatted SD I use for my camera. Presto! Phone worked like a charm. I dumped the original 32G card to my laptop and formatted it and tried it again. No go, the phone wouldn't load. I've now copied all the important stuff to the new card and am back in business. The phone is running faster and better than it has in months. Apparently it's been slowly dying for a while.

What I find interesting, my laptop will read and write to the card with no problem but the phone locks up every time. I would think, if the card is bad, nothing would read it or write to it.

I'm a happy camper. I like this phone and don't really want to replace it any time soon.

TLDR, The moral to the story, if your phone is acting buggy, try a new SD card. Apparently they fail and can cause all kinds of issues.

Yeah it's strange that it works in the laptop but not the phone, especially after formatting. That doesn't make any sense.

In reply to GameboyRMH:

The only thing I can figure, is it's a read/write speed issue. Maybe the laptop will wade through the junk because of processing power.

GameboyRMH wrote: Yeah it's strange that it works in the laptop but not the phone, especially after formatting. That doesn't make any sense.

I have a couple cameras that use SD cards. If I format new cards on my computer they won't work, but format the same card in the camera and everything is fine.

Hal wrote:

GameboyRMH wrote: Yeah it's strange that it works in the laptop but not the phone, especially after formatting. That doesn't make any sense.

I have a couple cameras that use SD cards. If I format new cards on my computer they won't work, but format the same card in the camera and everything is fine.

I've seen that, it's because of minor differences in how the PC and camera configure the filesystem, and the camera chokes when everything isn't exactly as it expects.

Well.... or Fat32 vs. NTFS. Phones and cameras typically use FAT32.

Yep virtually every phone and camera out there uses FAT32. But many cameras need their FAT32 to be a certain way.

I have a 16GB that works fine in my elcheapo Acer tablet, but won't work in anything else. Go figure.

I've fried more than a few on Raspberri Pis that will still work in my computer or camera.

It used to be that the FAT implementations in many cameras were really really buggy. Standard recommendation among photographers was to not mess with the filesystem on the card any more than absolutely necessary -- shoot pictures to the card, read them off onto your computer, then put the card back in the camera and reformat it. In particularly, deleting cards off the flash using the controls on the camera was known to cause filesystem corruption.

It seems like most of those bugs have been worked out there days, though, and I wouldn't expect the same to apply to smartphones. Smartphones are built on a much more solid underlying OS (Android uses Linux, iOS uses an Apple kernel) which have much better tested filesystem implementations.

GameboyRMH wrote:

Hal wrote:

GameboyRMH wrote: Yeah it's strange that it works in the laptop but not the phone, especially after formatting. That doesn't make any sense.

I have a couple cameras that use SD cards. If I format new cards on my computer they won't work, but format the same card in the camera and everything is fine.

I've seen that, it's because of minor differences in how the PC and camera configure the filesystem, and the camera chokes when everything isn't exactly as it expects.

The card that works, was formatted on the computer and all the files on it were transferred with the computer.

Cards are rather cheap. If you've got the files off it, I'd simply chuck the card.