Database Develop

Camera/SD problem. 4 tilts, one funky

For some reason y tilts only showing i can hold 205 pics more on my SD card, but i have just over 4 gigs free on my 8gb card.
We have 4 tilts and mine is the only one that is doing this. I threw in a blank 1gb sd card and it then shows over a 1,000 can be store.
took everything off my card and formatted it, then it showed i can store over 7,000. But i put my docs and stuff back on and its showing 205 again.
All three of the other phones are showing over 1,000's can be stored still. My wifes has about the same space used and available, yet she can store over 2,000 still. Any clues?

i could've sworn i replied to this post this afternoon...it must have gottem lost in the internets
anyway, assuming you have a card reader and a desktop/laptop running Windows 2000/XP/Vista, do a file system check AFTER copying your personal documents and files BACK onto the card. i suspect a file or set of files from your "collection" is causing your card to loose its marbles. the file system check SHOULD fix it.
alternately, you can try to copy back your data little by little until the problem shows up, and then you'll know which set of files was the problem.
my money is on the file system check approach!
good luck!

I think you are right. I did the "schedule boot time scan and fix" yesterday after i posted this and it didnt do anything. I ran it from the card reader on vista notebook. It took a long time and didnt show me a report, so i assume everything looked fine. But iduno. Is there somewhere in vista ultimate that will show me report of that scan? I was thinking along the same lines of it being some files having errors, but if the scan didnt fix it, i think your idea (though a long nasty task) of moving files onto the card one by one is the only thing i can do.

I found the report file right on the sd card, here it is.
Checking file system on F:
The type of the file system is FAT32.
A disk check has been scheduled.
Windows will now check the disk.
Volume Serial Number is CA0B-7111
Windows is verifying free space...
Free space verification is complete.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.
7753728 KB total disk space.
2016 KB in 63 hidden files.
4832 KB in 151 folders.
3128736 KB in 2431 files.
4618112 KB are available.
32768 bytes in each allocation unit.
242304 total allocation units on disk.
144316 allocation units available on disk.

I thought, maybe the camera is only seeing half the cards capacity, so, I decided to load the heck out of my card with mp3's. I got almost 2 gigs free on the 8gb card and the camera decides to tell me i can fit well over 5,000 photos.
To me it seems like, yeah, we can use up to 16gb cards in these phones, but the camera can only see 4gb at a time. Something weird like that.

Just as a test try changeing the default loaction from DCIM to My Pictures. "or reverse if already is"

Ok, just tried that and it didnt resolve the problem. I even took a picture to invent the directory.
In use 3145.47 MB and Free 4426.53 MB
And 639 photos can be store according to the camera. Differs from OP because i eliminated some mp3's.

Gotta be something to do with the allocated space or not seeing full capacity, i only got my 8GB card yesterday:
Card Size: 7768.81 MB
Free Space: 4147.98 MB
Camera shows that i have 118 shots available. "should be far more"
Ok so all i do is place a movie on and i get:
Free Space: 4073.43MB
Camera shows that i have 9410 shots available.
Now my assumption is that it works in 4GB slots.
carhigh:
Dump aload on phone till hit over 4GB and see if you then get full capacity?

Good, im not the only one with this problem!! I thought about getting my card loaded with junk just enough that i only had a few pics left (according to the camera) and take those pics and see if the counter resets when it goes to zero, the next pic after that. But it would be very tedious to get it loaded just perect.
I posted above....
carhigh said:
I thought, maybe the camera is only seeing half the cards capacity, so, I decided to load the heck out of my card with mp3's. I got almost 2 gigs free on the 8gb card and the camera decides to tell me i can fit well over 5,000 photos.
To me it seems like, yeah, we can use up to 16gb cards in these phones, but the camera can only see 4gb at a time. Something weird like that.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

all the investigation in this thread could very well point to an "overflow" issue in the camera application's remaining disk space calculation logic.
4GB of actual free remaining disk space may very well be the cut off point before the overflow occurs (perhaps the programmer(s) used a 32-bit counter, DWORD maybe as opposed to _int64 or ULONGLONG...the latter would allow the counter to count well beyond the 4GB point).
if this is indeed the case, it MIGHT have been fixed in one of the newer versions of the camera application.
all the same, a lame bug introduced by lame old HTC !!!

carhigh said:
Good, im not the only one with this problem!! I thought about getting my card loaded with junk just enough that i only had a few pics left (according to the camera) and take those pics and see if the counter resets when it goes to zero, the next pic after that. But it would be very tedious to get it loaded just perect.
I posted above....
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I just thought you was being crazy JK but i can see the logic as to why there is the problem and ASCIIker explains it well
To be honest i can live with it as if you kept taking pictures you would never run out, all that would happen is the counter would suddenly jump up, oh untill you hit the card phsyical limit

Any suggestions on cameras to try? Meanwhile, i WILL be searching

carhigh said:
Any suggestions on cameras to try? Meanwhile, i WILL be searching
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If your using the 5 series then 6 series would be but most don't have auto-focus, like said previous i wouldn't go to the hastle as it will just drop to 1 picture left then shoot up to 9000'ish lol, not tryed but i'd place my kidney on it

I guess this would be version 4? version 4.08 (build 30665)
Found version 5. Love updating stuff

carhigh said:
I guess this would be version 4? version 4.08 (build 30665)
Found version 5. Love updating stuff
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Attached the 5 series one i use

Thanks. I got that installed on hers, and Nadavi_HTC_Camera_5_0_4_2915_00 on mine. Not sure whats different.
The only thing i am unhappy about is the naming of the images. With the old #4 version, you could set the pics so they were named by date. I cant seem to find it in these versions.

carhigh said:
Thanks. I got that installed on hers, and Nadavi_HTC_Camera_5_0_4_2915_00 on mine. Not sure whats different.
The only thing i am unhappy about is the naming of the images. With the old #4 version, you could set the pics so they were named by date. I cant seem to find it in these versions.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ok Advanced Config and change the save location from DCIM to My Pictures soft-reset and the option magically becomes available
I just prefer HTC to the tweaked Nadavi also one i attached is newer

Cool thanks.

Deleted pics remain cache!

Woops! I thought I had deleted some incriminating pictures from the gallery and with astro file manager BUT while looking through the SD card , I found old deleted pics!
How can I really delete pictures without them showing up in some cache directory?

I heard that in-order to do so you needed to email them to someone totally random. I can give you a totally random email address for this purpose if you like ;-)
I think there are Cache clearing apps on the market, last i remember anyways.

LOL...
Thats no good. It should delete without any apps...damn.

all it does is super compress them so they can be overwritten...

As you'll no doubt aware, most disks/SSDs, memory sticks, microSDs still contain most old "deleted" files, even if they aren't obvious, until where the data was has been overwritten by something else..
Couple of useful bits of code, TestDisk & PhotoRec can help recover lost stuff (or stuff someone thought they'd deleted (!!!!) )..
get them here..
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
NB Both these bits of software can completely screw machines/PCs/Laptops. whatever so BE CAREFULL!!!!!
I'm just about to try PhotoRec on the N1 and see what she finds... & will report...
My mate dodgy Rob found fascinating deleted SMS messages on his wife's (non-Android) 'phone.... the story of what he did about it is even funnier...
Cheers!
Lodger

Yup, Photorec can recover deleted stuff - .jpegs, .mov, .mpegs.. at least it did from my N1... - you have been warned ...
Running Ubuntu (Linux) & looking at the microSD card it reports 907 items on the microSD
Photorec recovered 3,724 items (!).. on the microSD and kindly copied them all to my Laptop..
If you really really need to feel confident something has gone then (I'm not an expert mind...) i understand you need to either..
a) (quick 'n dirty method ..) Fill up the apparently " empty" bit of the SD with garbage - eg some other .jpegs... or
b) To be really certain, re-format her: Several times... probably with several different file systems (FAT32, NTFS, EXT3...) , and don't chose the "quick" options...
Cheers!
Lodger

mine disappear after a soft reset

Damn.....not good. How am I suppose to receive rated r pics from girls and not have my gf find out!

iag48 said:
Damn.....not good. How am I suppose to receive rated r pics from girls and not have my gf find out!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
youre a horrible man

cymru said:
I heard that in-order to do so you needed to email them to someone totally random. I can give you a totally random email address for this purpose if you like ;-)
I think there are Cache clearing apps on the market, last i remember anyways.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I developed CacheMate for clearing cache. It would not work for this purpose. There are a few places where the images would be stored. When in the DCIM directory in /sdcard using Astro, make sure you are viewing hidden file and directories. You can do this by check the "Show Hidden Files" checkbox in Menu > Preferences > Look and Feel. You need to delete the pics from the .thumbnails directory too. If you really want, you can always cue them up in the gallery and delete them that way (long pressing on the pictures brings up the multiple select checkbox). Hope this helps a little.

Thanks for the help.

Re: get pics back from sd card
Actually, the easy way to recover deleted photos from sd card or hard disk is to use a photo software. You can google it and you will get many photo recovery softwares. But they are mostly not free. I have come across the same thing like you. Finally, I get my pics back with Yesterdata.
Kind Tips:
Don't save the recovered data on your memory card again. Find another place for it like on your computer or other external disk, for safety's sake.

iag48 said:
Woops! I thought I had deleted some incriminating pictures from the gallery and with astro file manager BUT while looking through the SD card , I found old deleted pics!
How can I really delete pictures without them showing up in some cache directory?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This should not happen as deleted pictures remains on the phone. But there are nexus photo recovery tool that helps to undelete photos on nexus phones. See this article: recover deleted photos on nexus phone
hope this helps.

Strange file system issues

My file system is totally confused. When I browse to EMMC from a file manager it goes to my SD Card. If I browse to SD Card it actually goes to the internal drive.
I've had my rooted Nook Color for about 5 weeks now (CM7 booted from a SD card). Everything was working great until I tried installing some different launchers. I tried GoLauncher, Zeam, ICS, Honeycomb and maybe one more. The default was ADW. Maybe I confused the system by constantly switching from one to the next but at some point the system crashed and I rebooted.
Once rebooted I noticed that many of the games I installed told me I needed to redownload their data files. I looked on my card, through my Mac, but the original files were still there. Turns out the Nook now installs apps on the internal drive rather than the card as it had been before.
Wouldn't be so bad but, as mentioned earlier, the file system is confused. When i need to manage files I've loaded on my SD card I have to browse to EMMC and vice versa. Makes my head spin.
Is there a way to fix it without starting from scratch? I'm using CM7.2.0.
Thanks for your help

That's not a bug, it's a feature. Anyway, what you likely did is Settings -> Cyanogenmod Settings -> Application Settings -> Use internal storage (checked). If you do this, then it swaps the mount points for the SD and the internal memory, so the SD card is mounted at "/emmc" and the internal memory is mounted at "/sdcard". See the first post in the thread in my sig for more information about this.
If you really want to return it to the original way, wasting 5G of internal storage space, then you can uncheck that box in the settings and it'll go back to normal.

Thanks for pointing that out and glad to see there's an easy fix. Seems a bit confusing though, like it's renaming your hard drives or something. I had been using the internal drive for storing media files, video, music, comics. Does it matter where apps or files are stored?

false1 said:
Thanks for pointing that out and glad to see there's an easy fix. Seems a bit confusing though, like it's renaming your hard drives or something. I had been using the internal drive for storing media files, video, music, comics. Does it matter where apps or files are stored?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, the "fix", IMHO, is to leave it with them swapped.
Yes, it matters where apps are stored and it matters what is mounted at /sdcard. Apps use space on the /sdcard partition for settings, temp storage, downloads, etc. Mounting that 5G partition at /sdcard instead of /emmc allows these apps to use that space rather than cluttering your actual SD card. And apps are going to wind up on your 1G partition, not on either the /sdcard or /emmc mountpoint.
You can go read up in my guide on my recommendation on how to best use this space. The normal way is inefficient and wasteful of internal memory, IMHO. But you know, maybe you like it that way

mr72 said:
You can go read up in my guide on my recommendation on how to best use this space. The normal way is inefficient and wasteful of internal memory, IMHO. But you know, maybe you like it that way
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think efficiency is more in how you choose to utilise the spaces rather than fundamentally in which switch option you use. For example, I choose to completely fill the 5GB of internal with sound and picture media as they get included in the normal app scanning process. Leaving the SD card to hold yet more media, app data and back ups.
It's still good to have the choice offered by the switch.

[Q] DCIM thumbnails taking over storage - need a fix!

Ok so I have an SGS for over a year now, with an external sd of 16GB and cyanogenmod 10 installed (this one). It's fantastic. But, recently I started having some storage problems. I couldn't update anything or download any new app or even take a picture. This seemed odd as I don't have that many applications installed and I keep all my big files on the external sd. So I started clearing caches and moving applications to the sd. Those solutions didn't last long.
Worse, ther weird part was yet to come. When I checked my settings >> storage, I found that there should be more than a 1.5GB of free space. But, If I checked my settings >> Apps >> On SD Card, I could see that there was only around 5MB of space left. Still, I found some old backup that I didn't need anymore, so I deleted that. hooray, there were now 500MB free to use. That is, until the next day when again, there was zero space to be used. I was shocked because during that time I didn't install anything new, I only took a small video of less than a minute, which by itself didn't weight more than 60MB of space.
Something was definetly up. Using File Manager I tried checking where all the data is, and I found that, to my amazement, in the DCIM folder, there was a folder named ".thumbnails" which took up 2GB of space. That is a lot. seaching around the Forums here, it seems I'm not the first one to notice this problem.
And the solution always seems to be "just delete the thumbnails". To me that seems a bit crass and not really a solution. I'm not tech enough to know what are the implications of simply deleting those files, and I'm not sure how long it's going to last anyway, before I need to do it again. So I'd like to know if there's some kind of fix I can install or some configuration I can change that would make sure it doesn't happen again. Or, if anything, some explanation in layman's terms why it's okay to simply delete those files. I'd like to mention that my phone is rooted, and I have CWM, Rom Manager and Terminal Emulator so I can use those if necessary.

AW: [Q] DCIM thumbnails taking over storage - need a fix!
That really is weird. Did you try to fix permissions in cwm recovery? I'm not sure it would even check that directory but it surely doesn't hurt.
Even if it works it will not cure your immediate problem. You will need to delete the thumbnail folder or the files in it. And here is why you don't have to worry.
Thumbnails are small files that store a preview of your images. They get created by your image viewer and are updated whenever it detects a change in the image file. When your viewer doesn't find a thumbnail it needs to read the whole image file, create a preview and show this. The created preview is then saved as thumbnail so it can be loaded next time the program needs to show the image.
In short: if you delete the thumbnails then they will be recreated next time your image viewer shows the images. So there is nothing to lose. You can safely delete the thumbnails.
JUST BE SURE THEY REALLY ARE THUMBNAILS AND NOT THE IMAGES THEMSELVES!

Files disappeared,

Yes, I know how to use google, yes, I tried many things now and I don't know where else to look for help so I'm asking here, a place with many smart heads full of ideas.
I was doing pretty normal thing on my phone this morning, just trying to copy all the files from internal memory onto the PC. Of course I couldn't do that thanks to "Unspecified error" during copying some of the folders, including Downloads and DCIM. I managed to copy only some of the files from internal storage. I thought a reboot might help. And so the nightmare began. All the other files I wanted to copy disappeared from gallery and Total Commander. They must be on the phone though, as there is something on the phone that uses 2gb of memory. I did not delete them, the system just fails to see them. I already tried deleting all the ".nomedia" files, clearing cache and data from Media Storage app, disabling it, rebooting and enabling again but it was of no use. I'm helpless and I don't know what to do, why did android even do this? I lost a lot of photos and images and I'm really upset about that. Any ideas what to do? The phone is not rooted, never played with software in it, it's updated to 5.1

Download any File Manager from Play Store, check if the files are on the phone memory. If not, well, they are somehow lost. Maybe you cut-paste them onto your PC, and the files were deleted, but you got an 'unspecified error' on moving.

Thanks a lot for a response. I use Total Commander on every android phone I had, I can see that my files look like they disappeared completely, android just generated empty generic folders ("Pictures etc) after I cut off the previous folders along with their content so I saved a little bit that I could. On the other hand something is occupying 2gb of data but the phone refuses to show what, so there is a chance my files are there. After copying the whole content of the phone to the folder on desktop it just shows it weight few hundreds KB. I'll be trying to use some recovery software for android. The question is how did this happen at all? It had no right to happen, what if this happened to someone who has completely no idea about that stuff? Who's to blame and who's responsible for helping such a person? Motorola? Google? Anyway, this is the last phone with no micro-sd card slot I used. A memory card is the best backup

You COULD recover your files even if they were deleted if Android still had a mass storage mode. I don't think any of the data recovery softwares play nice with the MTP transfer that android offers. Of course, the SD card is infinitely better, but a rarity these days. I am sorry for your lost data. You seem like you did everything within your reach to get it back.
EDIT: Just to be sure, did you cut-paste the folders on your PC from phone, or just copy-paste. It might be possible for files to be deleted in cut-paste, if some error occurs in copy.

Thanks for contributing. It seems Google knows better then any of us what we need and there's no more Mass Storage option which gives free access to memory. Unfortunately I don't have that option. First I ensured which files are not affected by error by trying to copy them folder after folder. Then there were left files I couldn't copy, it was DCIM with most recent photos (unfortunately) and download where I kept lots of images with cool infographics found on the internet. I thought a reboot would help to get access to them and you know the rest. Files were there no longer. I'm seriously considering switching to Windows Phone, it seem it's too much to ask for a phone that just "werks" nowadays...I have a painful lesson to use memory card as well as cloud synchronizing but didn't give up yet, still trying anything I can I also wrote to Motorola with help request but I don't think they'll help me any better than people here, although it's more their responsibility to fix that stuff, the phone is barely 6 months old.