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I am running Duttys March 4 Dual Touch, No Cube on my Kaiser. Probably unrelated, but yesterday every thing on my 6GB Sandisk Storage Card disappeared
About 750mb of data! The card appears empty in File Manager until I select "Show all files" when a single folder called WMDRM containing a single 132kb file shows up.
If I go to Settings> System> Memory The storage card shows 738mb used and 5084mb free. So it appears the data is there but inaccessible. If I browse the card from activeSync the same is also the case. Properties tell be 738mb used, but nothing is visibel except the single small file.
Any ideas on how I might be able to get it back? Really want to get my data back....
Storage Card scrambled files?
logger said:
I am running Duttys March 4 Dual Touch, No Cube on my Kaiser. Probably unrelated, but yesterday every thing on my 6GB Sandisk Storage Card disappeared
About 750mb of data! The card appears empty in File Manager until I select "Show all files" when a single folder called WMDRM containing a single 132kb file shows up.
If I go to Settings> System> Memory The storage card shows 738mb used and 5084mb free. So it appears the data is there but inaccessible. If I browse the card from activeSync the same is also the case. Properties tell be 738mb used, but nothing is visibel except the single small file.
Any ideas on how I might be able to get it back? Really want to get my data back....
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You may have scrambled your files.
Put it into a USB card reader and try to access it on your PC - if it looks the same there, try looking at it with a good file undeleter like Fix-It Utilities or Norton, see if you can recover anything.
I just had a laptop hard drive fail on my last week, so I feel your pain. Fortunately I had fairly recent backups so I didn't lose too much.
Makes me think of someone's tagline I saw once:
"There are 2 kinds of people in this world, those with a backup plan in place, and those that have not yet had a catastrophic disk failure"
Good luck!
Search this site for SD CARD2
Most likely the issue is cause by the infamous Win CE bug.
If I have not posted the solution here, do a google search in the Web, you'll find detailed instructions.
[Edit] Your data is there, so don't do anything foolish, or else you'll have to reinstall everything. The SD CARD2 issue is very simple to resolve.
Thanks guys. Had a look as SD CARD2 threads and they did not seem to relate to me. Ran Pocket Mechanic and its Scandisk feature on the Card and it reported loads of "lost clusters". I then ran it again with "Automatically fix errors" and "discard lost clusters" and it merrily removed them all. So now my 738mb of data has gone. Rats. Oh well I will just start again a fresh and hope it does nto happen again.
i feel your pain. it's happened to me quite a few times on my XDA II, and once recently on my Kaiser when i damaged the mini-usb port (entirely my fault) and it started writing corrupted data onto the card when copying files over through activesync
I've since taken to keeping copies of my card data in addition to backups of my device. i usually carry 2 cards with me, one backup and one "current"; and i also keep backups of my SD cards on my PC, just in case.
Strangely, After a few hours most of the data on the card spontaneously returned. One minute it was empty and the next it had all the folders and files back again. Albeit with a lot of lost clusters and a heap of files reported as 32kb. Was able to recover a lot of the stuff and have got another 2GB card to use in the mean time.
Is there much point in reformatting the card? From experience, does anyone know if formatting might "fix" whatever caused it to lose clusters and go bad? Am considering sending it back for a warranty claim but how can I ascertain if it is actaully faulty once I reformat it.
Reformat or replace?
logger said:
Strangely, After a few hours most of the data on the card spontaneously returned. One minute it was empty and the next it had all the folders and files back again. Albeit with a lot of lost clusters and a heap of files reported as 32kb. Was able to recover a lot of the stuff and have got another 2GB card to use in the mean time.
Is there much point in reformatting the card? From experience, does anyone know if formatting might "fix" whatever caused it to lose clusters and go bad? Am considering sending it back for a warranty claim but how can I ascertain if it is actaully faulty once I reformat it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have had USB flash memory seem to be faulty, especially when trying to transfer large amounts of data for a backup - then rebooted and re-inserted and had readable data. I would try reformatting, and then back up often and watch it like a hawk. Or, if it wasn't too expensive, just discard. Or, try to get a replacement - I did get an SD card replaced once at N/C because it wouldn't read in anything I tried it in, and I complained and was heard.
I bought a replacement 2GB panasonic microSD in Japan a couple of days back. (Always find the memory quality excellent there.) Their eyes were out on stalks when they saw my 6GB card. Must not be wideley available there yet. Anyway I plan to use the 2gb for the time being to rule out hardware and software causes. Have reformatted the suspect 6gb card. Will soon start using it again with everything backed up to the max and hopefully the problem will not return. I have been flashing a few different ROMs. Because of this I am becoming ever more reliant on the Storage Card for system recovery. So cant afford to have a dodgy one.
Hi, folks.
I use a HTC cruise with WM6.1 from Bepe. This morning, all files from my 8GB miniSD card just vanisehd!!! I removed the card from the phone and tried to access the files in windows with a sd card reader, but no file was seen. Although, there was only 3,5GB free!!! The files weren't there, but they kept occupying space. I used this software to recover the files. Awesome! They were all there, except for the ones stored in root. Also,I had to rename all root folders, the subfolders were OK. I just had to filter files marked as "good" and then copied them to my HD. The phone is working as usual, but I can't explain why exactly this happened? Would it be a vicious virus? A joke from Micro$oft? Any ideas?!?
Thanks in advance for any help.
Something created a folder on the storage card in my Tilt called "(" . It appears to be empty. I am unable to delete it. I even tried taking the card out of the Tilt and putting it in a card reader. XP also sees the folder, but I can't delete it. If I use iSilo and navigate to the storage card, the folder list blinks that folder, that is, it appears ... disappears ... appears ... etc.
Any help getting rid of the folder would be greatly appreciated.
Sounds annoying, have you tried a registry editor? I think you are worrying too much about it though if it has nothing in it.
It is annoying ...
as in the iSilo example I cited. If I'm in the root of the storage card in iSilo, I have to time the tap perfectly to select a folder because literally the "(" folder appears and disappears and every folder below it changes position.
I assumed I might need to use my registry editor, but I'm not sure where to look.
try formatting the SD card
Lol, i asnwered this on the ATT forums. Look there and hopefully it will help you
Yeah, I had that problem with a folder randomly showing up with a bunch of special characters for the name, which windows doesn't like and you can't do anything with. (On my old 2125 I had one show up that was empty, but the phone kept thinking it was like 2 GB full, but it was only a 1GB card!! weird!) Anyway, to get rid of it I had to pull the card out of the phone and put it into a card reader on my PC, then I pulled all of the data other than the erroneous folder off the card and saved it temporarily to the PC, and then I reformatted the card. Put all the stuff back on, and put it back into my phone. It was a pain, but it worked.
The problem is due to storage card corruption/file corruption. I see this on a somewhat regular basis (~1500 users). I believe it is caused when the device goes into standby while writing to the storage card. I thought Win Mobile 6 handled this better than Win Mobile 5 but maybe not.
It is best to reformat the storage card if this happens.
I've been using a 6G ScanDisk card for the last 6 months, without any problems. I needed to move some files from the Tilt's internal memory to the Card, and to my surprise there was only a folder named "FilesToBeDeleted" on the Card. I DID NOT CREATE THIS FOLDER! Oh, and by the way the folder was empty!
Checking the storage of the card from the Memory Setting of the PPC, shows about 3 G in use, which is about what I had on it.
Can anyone shed any light on what could have happened? I can re-format the Card....but is it going to loose data again? Is this something that has happened to others?
Thanks for any help,
mlpoland said:
I've been using a 6G ScanDisk card for the last 6 months, without any problems. I needed to move some files from the Tilt's internal memory to the Card, and to my surprise there was only a folder named "FilesToBeDeleted" on the Card. I DID NOT CREATE THIS FOLDER! Oh, and by the way the folder was empty!
Checking the storage of the card from the Memory Setting of the PPC, shows about 3 G in use, which is about what I had on it.
Can anyone shed any light on what could have happened? I can re-format the Card....but is it going to loose data again? Is this something that has happened to others?
Thanks for any help,
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i have read that this has happened to some people .. not me yet (fingers crossed) don't know what causes this. You could try a recovery software and see if you can get the stuff back.
Can you or anyone suggest a recovery software? Checking the MicroSD on my laptop shows 2.88 GB being used, (and of course 2.78 GB Free) so the data should be there. I have also saved additional data to the card and it works fine.
Just wondering...is there some kind of virus out there that would do this? For all the data to be "hidden" and a new folder to be created....the card just didn't create a folder by itself....
WM a card killer
The same thing happened to my 4GB SD card in Blue Angel (twice ). It seems to me that WM kills allocation table while writing to the card. I tried lots of different soft to recover my card and finally PC Inspector File Recovery did the job. I used card reader and this soft on PC to recover most of my files but the folder and filenames were sometimes messed up. When using PCI FR do not mark to many files to recover/save at the one time because it crashes.
Don't save anything on your card before recovering !
http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file_recovery/info.htm?language=1
Hope my Kaiser is not going to do this to me
rafgerm said:
The same thing happened to my 4GB SD card in Blue Angel (twice ). It seems to me that WM kills allocation table while writing to the card. I tried lots of different soft to recover my card and finally PC Inspector File Recovery did the job. I used card reader and this soft on PC to recover most of my files but the folder and filenames were sometimes messed up. When using PCI FR do not mark to many files to recover/save at the one time because it crashes.
Don't save anything on your card before recovering !
http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file_recovery/info.htm?language=1
Hope my Kaiser is not going to do this to me
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yup, I used that program too. Recovered "missing files" problems on my previous hw6515 and twice on my TytnII 8GB micro SDdisk.
I've always had that "FilesToBeDeleted" folder too, it's normally hidden and when I delete it it comes back. Nothing special, just some folder the system wants there for some reason apparently, just like the other couple of hidden ones like WMDRM. If you didn't see it before and it now appeared it might have been hidden and the same thing that corrupt the FAT unhid it for some reason.
If you can see 2.88GB used on the PC, are you sure you have also have forced hidden files to display? Your data might be there but just hidden for some reason.
I have also saved additional data to the card and it works fine.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
NEVER EVER do that to a media with a problem you might need to recover data from. This might just have ruined your last chance. On the opposite, when possible like on SD cards the first thing you'll want to do is set it as read-only.
When files are deleted, only their reference in the file table are, but the data itself is still present on the media, which allows recovery. But the locations the data is saved on are now marked as free, and anything you'll write on the card now can overwrite it, causing definitive loss.
Thanks a ton!!! The PC Inspector program worked great!! I was able to recover my files Next step, I guess, is to format the card and use it untill it decides to wipe my files out again. Of course my failth is the card will never be the same, and I'll keep a back up of the card also.....actually I was foolishly keeping the back-up for my Tilt on the card...can't trust that method anymore!
Thanks again for all the advise and information. As with all problems, you can always treat them as "learning opportunities", or...... throw the d*** thing out a window!!!!!
Same problem here, just ran into it last night and it's driving me nuts. Is there a way to recover/format the card from within the kaiser? Unfortunately the card reader I have has a max size limitation of 2gb and the card I'm using is 4gb - lame. Any suggestions? Thanks.
sammy-e said:
Unfortunately the card reader I have has a max size limitation of 2gb and the card I'm using is 4gb - lame. Any suggestions? Thanks.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Borrow, lend, or steal another card reader.
When I purchased this MicroCard, from ScanDisk, it came with a SD adapter plus a USB Card reader. I threw the USB Card reader in my desk thinking that I would not need this. I found out, by accident, that this USB card reader was the only way I could read the card on a PC. Built in card readers on both my home desk top and laptop would not access the card....
Just passing on this little bit of information, because it never occured to me that I had to use that USB Card reader!
This happened to my girlfriend's phone too. One day some of her programs just didn't work and most everything was gone on her card. Never fixed it, just reformatted card. Scary though.
Yeah, I tried recovering the data using TestDisk, saw some recommendations for it from others with the same problem, but wasn't able to get anywhere with it unfortunately. So in the end all I could do was format it and start over. Ahhh, backups... if I'd only made one.
I think this is a WM issue. Since other devices have the same problem.
here is a quote from another thread
Dutchman said:
I have the same issue with my tytn2.
Sometimes when i play some mp3s from my SD card and the device goes to standby or the program is closed my SD card is suddenly empty.
Removing the SD card and put it back in usually fixes it, sometimes a softreset also works.
So i believe this is a WM issue
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
see http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=376050
I had the problem that my SD Card was empty after activating Power Managment for it, disabled it and now it works for half a year perfectly
mlpoland said:
I've been using a 6G ScanDisk card for the last 6 months, without any problems. I needed to move some files from the Tilt's internal memory to the Card, and to my surprise there was only a folder named "FilesToBeDeleted" on the Card. I DID NOT CREATE THIS FOLDER! Oh, and by the way the folder was empty!
Checking the storage of the card from the Memory Setting of the PPC, shows about 3 G in use, which is about what I had on it.
Can anyone shed any light on what could have happened? I can re-format the Card....but is it going to loose data again? Is this something that has happened to others?
Thanks for any help,
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
IT'S A COMPUTER, I always carry a spare card, simple, job done. more time for girls/beer/pizza.
scilor said:
I had the problem that my SD Card was empty after activating Power Managment for it, disabled it and now it works for half a year perfectly
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Any hints on how to disable this? I did a quick search and found mention of it but nothing detailing how to control it. Thanks.
scilor said:
I had the problem that my SD Card was empty after activating Power Managment for it, disabled it and now it works for half a year perfectly
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I disabled it w/ kaiser tweak. Still i have the issue
Has anyone had the issue while pretty much not ever using Windows Media Player mobile? I was playing DRM'd audio files, is that possibly a common theme?
Could it be Moving PIE Cache?
Happened to me too. 8GB card. Just getting back up and running...wish I had read this last night. I put a bunch of stuff back on the card. Oops. Oh well. I think the common thread may be:
moving your PIE Cache to the SD Card.
Anyone else with this problem also move PIE Cache? Used Memmaid 2.0 to change it.
different in my case, I haven't changed any of the cache settings for PIE.
So, I had a folder on my storage card named "My Documents".
Inside I had several subfolders including tomtom maps, videos, ebooks, etc...
Everything was fine, until last night, just before going to bed I was playing around with Dinasoft Memmaid program (first time using the software) and did a scan and a clean, then went to bed.
So today, I went about my life, then synced my phone with my laptop for a few hours to charge the batteries...
...and when I wanted to update my ebooks subfolder, I noticed that my entire "My Documents" folder in my SD card, was gone...
I have to confess that I didn't read much about the documentation of Memaid, but I don't think its functions is to wipe out an entire folder. I have a backup of the files so it's not an important issue.
But I just want to find out the explanation for the missing folder?
P.S. my phone was also extremely slow and unresponsive, but all went back to normal after a soft reset.
Ok...
Today the same thing happen again, but this it's more severe...
Now ALL the folders in my storage card are gone!!!
The entire 2GBs worth of data from my Sandisk 8GB HCSD card....
When I right click on properties on the SD card, it shows that the card has 2GBs of storage being used...
But when I go to file explorer there's nothing...empty...
Surely, this can't be normal...
Has anybody encountered a similar situation?????
Sounds like a Counter Fit SD Card. Where did you get this card?
No....you serious??? don't say that....
I bought it online.
www.play.com
If it's counterfeit I would be very pissed off.
I mean when it arrived it didn't look like counterfeit. It had all the right packaging.
Here;'s my thinking. People who have bought counter fit SD cards are typically getting, say, 2GB cards marked as, say, 8GB. Since the card is showing that it is one thing when it is really another you get data corruption and file start to disappear.
Since you used Memmaid it tried to "fix" the file system. Causing data corruption.
Here's what I would do. Copy all the contents of your SD card to your computer. Reformat the SD card and try again.
After some time without an SD card, today I put one (Sandisk 32GB Ultra Plus I think) in the phone, formatted it as internal storage and opted to move data to the card.
The card got filled up to 17 GB; it seems the system has copied all the images and my files but no apps or other internal things.
Copied, not moved - because the internal storage remains to be filled up. The data however is inaccessible. I.e. when I eject or remove the card, there are no files visible on the phone, in fact it's as if there's no storage. E.g. the download folder doesn't exist, file managers can't see anything etc. So the files remain on the phone, but I can't access them.
Of course I can't move the data back from the card to the phone because... There's no space, so that process errors out.
Another problem this causes is when I update apps. The app gets moved to the card and all the app data gets reset/wiped.
What can I do about this? The phone isn't rooted or anything of the sort, it's all stock. However I also don't use Google's services, so I'm not exactly eager to do a factory reset and set everything from scratch. I have my files backed up, but I'd lose the app data, which would be a major hassle.
Thanks for any tips.
Try clearing the system cache.
You mean from the boot recovery menu? I did, it didn't help.
More notes:
- The "Free up space" button in storage doesn't work.
- Now I'm thinking, I have a lot of Google and Moto apps disabled, so maybe that's the problem (it's really been ages since I've messed with this, so I've forgotten about it). Any clue which app controls these things?
- I also just realized that every single file on the card has its date/time set to the time when I did the migration, and not when the files were originally created. Is this normal? (Cause it's pretty effed up.)
Anyway I'm not liking this. What can happen when I tell the system to "forget" the SD card? Any guesses?
The time stamp is normal.
There's hidden files, something...
Problem is, I can't get into the file system of the internal storage at all.
E.g. in Total Commander I can navigate the root folder and certain subfollders, but in terms of my files I can only get to the ones on the card; which is easy to distinguish due to the timestamp. And when the card us ejected or not present, there's nothing at all.
Factory reset if you get tired of playing with it... could be malware.
Any ideas, anyone? :/
What dis you mean be "formatted as internal storage"?
Well when you insert a new memory card, you can format is either as internal storage or external. Internal will act as just more phone storage, i.e. apps can be installed to it, and it's encrypted. Downside is there's no way to distinguish where anything gets saved.
External is just for files and in case of G6, it's not encrypted.
I think you better start from the beginning...
You always should use the SD card as a data drive.
Running apps should never go on it!
You never encrypt a data drive... unless you enjoy losing data!!!
Get the data off the SD card into the PC via data transfer from the phone.
Then factory reset the phone and reload.
Then add the SD card data drive, do not encrypt it! All critical data and backups go here.
Internal memory is for apps, the temporary download folder and the DCIM folder*.
*create a folder on the data drive to transfer photos from the DCIM folder on a regular basis.
Do Not name this folder DCIM! Name it Photo Master or such.
Excuse me, but you don't know what formatting as internal storage means, but you gonna give me a complete rundown how to use my phone in a completely different manner than I want to. I didn't ask any of this.
If I can't encrypt the SD card, then it might as well not be there at all. Motorola ****ed up by not supporting this.
Anyway, I sorta fixed it. Uninstalled some apps to clear up about 2.5GB of space, deleted all my files, "migrated" everything from card to phone, which was about 700 megs of nothing. Yep all my files were still there in the phone. And those 700 megs stayed on the card too. Whatever process is controlling this, is apparently unable to delete data.
Whatevs. Guess it's extra motivation to mess around with custom ROMs and stuff, I'm tired of OEM nonsense.
If you OS crashes/burns which is rare in Androids but certainly happens, your encrypted SD card data will not be accessible after a factory reset.
Lost forever... end of story.
That's why you never encrypt data drives; sooner or latter you will lose critical data, maybe your whole data base.
People are constantly posting here asking how to break 256 bit encryption. It's sadly halarious because it's not happening in their lifetime.
Meh, do what you will...
Same sheet here. I did the following and it worked:
1, while still in the phone, I backed up the content of the SD card. (Turned out I didn't need it, but better be safe)
2, switched off the phone
3, removed the SD card
4, Turned on the phone. Some apps, which didn't rely much on internal storage just worked without any issue. Others were missing the SD card.
5, From the drop-down menu I selected the SD-card related item and clicked on "Forget". This gave me some warnings, but I didn't have much to loose.
6, Magic happened: My phone recovered the previously hidden files and it worked just before I started the migration to SD card!
tohotom said:
Same sheet here. I did the following and it worked:
1, while still in the phone, I backed up the content of the SD card. (Turned out I didn't need it, but better be safe)
2, switched off the phone
3, removed the SD card
4, Turned on the phone. Some apps, which didn't rely much on internal storage just worked without any issue. Others were missing the SD card.
5, From the drop-down menu I selected the SD-card related item and clicked on "Forget". This gave me some warnings, but I didn't have much to loose.
6, Magic happened: My phone recovered the previously hidden files and it worked just before I started the migration to SD card!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Welcome to XDA
Apps, DCIM and download folders go on internal memory.
All critical data including regular backups for the dcim folder go on the SD card ie data drive.
Any apps that allow backups can be backed up on the data drive but never running from it.
Once you add a SD card leave it in the device and access it through the device only to avoid issues.
If you're dealing with under 128gb internal memory... life will be hard*. That's what I consider a bare bones minimum, 256gb or larger is better.
*Adjust the amount of apps loaded accordingly and leave a couple gb of headroom. If you only got 16gb of memory it's going to be a light load.