Samsung Note 3: MicroSD card data gone overnight

[Frank James]

This morning I jacked my earphones into the phone (Samsung Note 3, six month old), expecting to hear a random song selected from the over 25 gb of music stored on the microSD card inside the phone. All I heard was the stupid generic Samsung tune. Opened up my music player app to find that all of my stored music is gone. In fact, everything on the card is gone, except...the directory folders are still listed but all are missing the first letter of their title, replaced by this symbol: µ.

Example MUSIC became µUSIC. Well, I thought, that's a strange glitch. Let's try renaming the folder back to its original title. (Invoking the ghost of Peter Norton.) No, that didn't work. Every folder now contains ZERO BYTES. All of my stored pictures and music are gone. I have done nothing to cause this, and my wife, who likes to occasionally use my phone, swears she has done nothing. The only diversion from routine was last night I powered off for the night, powered back on today. I have done this many times, but nothing bad ever happened before.

Most of the music is still available on my two laptops and on an auxiliary hard drive. It will take many hours to copy it all back in (about 26 gb), but, in the great scheme of life, it hardly rates as a tragedy. I am just wondering how this could happen.

Any ideas? Maybe one of my apps contains a virus? I haven't downloaded any new apps for a long time. Am currently scanning the phone with AVG anti-virus, but don't expect to find anything.

WEIRD.

[Spoonman]

The remote control thief has struck again ?

[Upnotover]

I have had this same thing happen and went into settings>>general>>storage then unmount sd card then mount sd card and everything came back. Exact same happened on my friends non-Samsung android as well.

[Wonka]

If the unmount/mount method don't work, try from a PC with an old DOS program named "undelete".

[Shurup]

OP. There maybe a few possibilities.

1. SD card glitch. Quite a few people have issues with cheap SD cards going bad. Not saying your SD card is cheap, I don't know, but even expensive cards aren't failproof.

2. A virus. Not very likely unless you constantly download stuff of internet and browse porno/warez, etc sites daily.

3. There was some sort of automated system update that somehow screwed up things. Also not very likely as normally, even if automatic system update is turned on, it would in many cases ask for user's confirmation to install it.

1st thing I would do it restart the phone, if no help, power down, remove the battery and SD card from the phone, re-insert the card and battery, power back up. If no help, try the card in your computer.

I'm inclined to think it's just a glitch with the SD card and hopefully a simple reboot will fix the issue.

Always do backups of all the important info (pics, contacts, etc.)

Edited July 11, 2014 by Tywais
Removed deleted quote

[Frank James]

Thanks to you all for all the help, everyone, even the Apple guy. I tried all of the mount/unmount tricks. Came to the conclusion that Satan did it, and the data was just gone forever. Went to Pantip and bought a new 32gb SanDisk "Ultra" (Yeah, wow, right?) Same one I had before...1090 baht. Spent a few hours copying/pasting all of the music saved on my other computers, about 10gb worth so far. For more, I will go look up Johnny Depp, Keith Richards & the Boys.

My eyeballs are burnt and my wrist is aching from all the copy/paste activity. Tomorrow I will format the old micro card and copy everything on it from the new one, as a backup.

According to AVG, my phone has no viruses. Just one of those strange happenings. I've been a slave to all of this electronic muckery since the 286/DOS days, so stuff like this doesn't throw me. Anyway, there was a lot of music on there I can live without. Move on down the line.

Thanks again.

[RichCor]

From a Google Search using the terms: android Note-3 sd-card µ

xda-developers

the µ symbol is a sign of sd card corruption. usually formatting the card fixes the issue. doing nothing, though, will let the issue become worse and it will continue affecting other files, backups, etc on the sd card. i've seen several users that had to eventually just get a new card.

[craigt3365]

Several bickering posts have been removed from view. Please abide by forum rules and be civil to each other.

[CharlieH]

If the bickering continues the thread will be closed.

[Tywais]

Off topic and argumentative posts removed. One post edited to remove quoted post.

[Digitalbanana]

>Opened up my music player app

What app do you use?

I've had movies disappear on a Note 2 using VLC player, don't know why, but it is only beta.

[Shurup]

>Opened up my music player app

What app do you use?

I've had movies disappear on a Note 2 using VLC player, don't know why, but it is only beta.

You may need to add a custom path in settings to the external SD card. See screenshot. The original path stopped working after the Android system upgrade so now I have 2 paths. If I turn one off, the other turns off as well.

Sent from one of my mobiles, whatever mobile it is.

[Frank James]

Managed to make a big dent in the new card. 156 albums so far loaded in, and more coming. One third full. Just now re-formatted the original card, to be used as a mirror backup. Wonder how long that will take to copy across, and will it copy cleanly all the way without jamming up? And without doing damage/corruption to the new card? We shall see.

The question remains...how did the name brand, good quality SD card get corrupted? I'm thinking the app ("Poweramp Premium") I was using as a music player might have done something. I always leave the player on shuffle mode, with the program picking successive random songs. Relieves me of the agony of having to choose. At odd times the program would refuse to run, with a message about "too many failed files" or something like that. It always cleared up after I restarted the device. For now I am using the default music player that came with the phone. No difference in sound quality, to my wrecked ears, although it is not possible to play with the emulated "equalizer."

Alternative hypothesis: collecting music files from torrent sites is a bit of a crap shoot. Might have picked up a case of audio VD that way. Better than paying the "services" 99 cents a song. My thin justification: almost all of my favorite artists are deceased, gone but never forgotten. Where they've gone, (The Juke Box in the Sky!) royalties are not needed.

Can anyone recommend a better android app (yes Apple fans, we are speaking only of your despised "inferior" open source rival here. poor us) to use for playing music?

Again, thanks for all of your thoughtful contributions. Much appreciated.

[Shurup]

The question remains...how did the name brand, good quality SD card get corrupted?

http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-MicroSDHC-Adapter-Frustration-Free-Packaging/product-reviews/B009QZH7BU?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addOneStar&showViewpoints=0&tag=webtoolandtec-20

From almost 15,000 reviews for SanDisk Ultra, almost 10% have had issues with their cards. As one of the customers said - SanDisk is doing great job advertising their name but their cards aren't that good.

That's the reason why I went with Samsung SD card after doing a little research.

[Frank James]

Now he tells me! Hope I got a good one this time. Thanks.

[build6]

SD cards go bad *all the time*. This is in fact one of the reasons why Apple does not allow for SD card expansion - not only does it improve their bottom line, they have absolute control over the source of memory chips that go into their products and so don't have to worry about people blaming them for corrupting their data when its not their fault.

Flash memory cells have a fixed lifetime of writes and reads. Each cell will die after "x" rewrites. This number can be surprisingly low (thousands not millions depending on the source). Thing is, often you are writing even when you don't realize it (some apps like to edit MP3 metadata without telling you for example. What's worse is if something is writing to the filesystem). The SD controller chip is supposed to "spread the rewrites around" and even out the "wear and tear" but that doesn't always work. So some cells could die while the others have an almost full service life ahead of them - but too bad the whole thing is junk now.

(Spreading out the rewrites often just causes other problems too - IIRC there is an Intel-branded SSD where 2+ years after its introduction, the forums erupted with complaints about data loss, apparently their math was wrong and the real lifespan was nowhere near their expected lifespan)

When buying SD cards I generally ignore marketing things like "lifetime warranty". Most people see that and think "that means they expect it to last forever!", which it does not. "Lifetime" is always defined as a fudgeable term ("product is obsolete/retired, no replacements") and you're better off getting a "fixed" lifespan product if replacements matter to you (if they say ten years, they need to mean ten years, or someone in America *will* sue. Caveat - the company needs to be around in ten years). When I need SD cards (or any other kind of memory), I get the ones that come from manufacturers who have their own chip fabs, ie they make their own chips instead of repackaging other people's. Sandisk does NOT have their own fabs. Neither does Kingston. You're better off with the "traditional" memory producers like Samsung, Toshiba if you can find it. The bet is that they'll keep their best product for themselves and Apple (who *will* sue them to oblivion), and then sell the rest to repackagers who have decided that replacing dead SD cards under "lifetime warranty" is cheaper than implementing better QA. But even then, no guarantees.

I will say I see those "Rizz" and "Asaki" SD cards in 7-11s and am very tempted to get one to test to destruction, just to collect data on how long they last.

Edited July 12, 2014 by build6

[rhythmworx]

The question remains...how did the name brand, good quality SD card get corrupted?

http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-MicroSDHC-Adapter-Frustration-Free-Packaging/product-reviews/B009QZH7BU?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addOneStar&showViewpoints=0&tag=webtoolandtec-20

From almost 15,000 reviews for SanDisk Ultra, almost 10% have had issues with their cards. As one of the customers said - SanDisk is doing great job advertising their name but their cards aren't that good.

That's the reason why I went with Samsung SD card after doing a little research.

What you got to take in to account though like most reviews on Amazon.

Were the 10% of the cards legitimate or fake cards?

Lots of fake gear on Amazon.

[Shurup]

The link in my post points to one seller only so I'd guess that one seller will try to keep their same sources steady.

Amazon was just one example, when I did my research I checked some of the other big online stores and SanDisk reviews were similar everywhere. The good thing is that customers can RMA their purchases back to the manufacturer, don't think it's possible with fakes.

Sent from one of my mobiles, whatever mobile it is.

[Turkleton]

There are well known issues with faulty Sandisk cards.

http://www.phonearena.com/news/SanDisk-says-it-produced-some-bad-32GB-and-64GB-microSD-cards_id40986

I had similar problems with a Sandisk, my phone "lost" the card several times a day.

(very funny, if you're using GPS in Bangkok and your maps are on SDcard...)

Mount and remount didn't help, only "out and in" made my phone to recognize the card again.

Replaced it with a Kingston, problem solved.

Edited July 12, 2014 by Turkleton