Android v5.1.1 and SD card write issues - android

I have a Sony Z5 Compact phone with a brand new, Sandisk UHS-I U3 32GB SD card.
The card used to work for a while (like 3 weeks), but now something happened to that.
Phone is not able to write onto the card at all.
I tried formatting that from the Android, from Windows, nothing works.
Symptoms:
1.) after formatting, I can create folders and copy files onto the sd card on Windows.
2.) after formatting, I can create folders on the card on android.
3.) if I copy anything, really, anything from Windows to Android (to the card), the card will deny the next file write operations.
4.) seems like if it gets readonly, but mount shows sdcard1 as rw.
5.) after this, putting the card to Windows, it works okay (without formatting)
Question:
I want to format the SD card, and put back in the phone, and put some music onto that. (without having it corrupted).
Thank you.
Ps.: I hope this is some right forum for this.

Related

SD card files with encrypted data (_CONSOLE text in it), how to get my files back?

I have an micro SD card, that was in a Galaxy J5 with Android 7, and all the files are messed up now. (jpg, pdf, mp3)
Following characters can be found in the beginning in all of the files, with minor changes in each one.
<ŕ’Ż4i“µŢî Ś- `6S座uť?ŃÖ0Ü]#Î.0€Ň(QlüŚíď¦îRíb_CONSOLE sżăm:Ń ..
.. and then a lot of NULLs following.
The _CONSOLE part is there in every file. That's why I think that all files were manipulated with the same method.
I am looking for somebody who has seen this kind of files.
I have seen it several times, it appears file based encryption. It is not limited to Android Linux, some NAS devices use it (- eCryptFS file-level encryption).
Seems the OS has written something along the lines of a table into the start of file/a way to read them. I am pretty sure the data is still there, just not visible. Try opening them via a hex editor and check if the NULL's are really null bytes or unreadable data
I had a similar issue. My Galaxy S8 could not longer read the files in the SD card (exFAT) I had encrypted before. I must somehow have deleted the file .MetaEcfsFile that contains the Samsung encryption info. See also here. Btw, the files with the _CONSOLE artifact are encrypted with OpenPGP message format (RFC2440)
My solution was:
Undelete the .MetaEcfsFile with Recuva from a PC using an SD card reader.
Reconnect the Phone via USB cable and copy that file via that connection. Direct copy via SD card reader didn't work. The phone deleted that file again after phone restart.
After the file was copied via cable, the SD card files were still encrypted/unreadable, but...
The phone menu Biometrics and security finally proposed Decrypt SD card and after I started the decryption, I got an error but all my files were decrypted and readable again.

How to change back vold.fstab with PC while Phone doesn't startup nor I can reset it

Since I changed my sdcard to sdcard1 in system/etc/vold.fstabfile, Now neither phone starts up nor I can reset. Can i reset it with PC or Change vold.fstab With PC. Phone is Sony Ericsson Experia Lt18i
Try to boot to recovery, if you get there, use adb to revert things, otherwise you can always come back to stock if you mess things up. Here's a link with steps and useful information. Install the PC Companion app follow the steps to do a factory reset.
http://www.hardreset.info/devices/sony-ericsson/sony-ericsson-xperia-arc-s-lt18i/
This method works perfectly in my Micromax A77 phone which I have rooted and have used the modified vold.fstab file for swapping the phone memory with the external card memory. Basically what happened in older smartphones (like 2015/2014 and before ones) that the manufacturers offered only limited amount of internal memory, like 2 GB or 4 GB max. So the internal memory became full even after installing a few apps and games as not all the memory was accessible. The android system also ate up almost 1/3rd of the available internal memory right from the day the phone was used. That made the users high and dry as the phone became really useless since one could not install any apps or games from play store or even from any apk file. Even the update of most of the apps failed from play store due to insufficient space problem. There are a number of third party apps link Link2SD etc but most of them don't work properly to help the users. Basically the main thing any user want is increase in phone memory/internal memory but that is not possible as that has already been installed by the manufacturer in the phone so u cannot install extra memory in the phone memory or internal memory. What u can do at most is insert an external Sd Card of 4/8/16/32/64 GB.... or any capacity that you device supports. But this also fails the purpose as the new apps will still be installed on the internal/phone memory and the not the external sd card thus defeating the purpose of increasing memory using external sd card. So there is no other option but to increase the phone memory which is possible using the tweaking and editing of the vold.fstab file. This file, the vold.fstab file is a system file which is present inside the "etc" folder of root folder (/). One needs total root access and a file explorer like ES explorer to access and edit the file. Using ordinary file explorer such as that provided by the manufacturer will not work in this case as the root folder and associated folders can only be accessed only using special explorers and ES Explorer is certainly one of the best explorers out there in the market. But to use the full functionality (to edit the vold.fstab) file, one needs to have root permissions which means that the phone should be rooted beforehand otherwise the process won't work. So this method only works for phone that are are rooted.
Once u have installed ES File explorer and assuming that u have granted Super User (SU) permissions to the ES explorer (when prompted by the SU), please navigate to the root of the phone (/). Go to the etc folder and open that folder. In side the etc folder u will find the vold.fstab file. Now long press the file. It will get selected and then u need to touch the more option on the explorer app. Once u press on more, u will get several options..select properties. Now select permissions on the properties option by touching on change. Select Read, Write and Execute options for both group and owner. Press Ok to change the permissions so that everyone has full access on this file (Read, Write and Execute). Then go back to the vold.fstab file and now open it instead of selecting it. The file will open but to edit it u will need to select the three dots on the menu and then select the Edit Option.
Once u are able to scroll the cursor over the file for editing, go to the line where it says :
"##Example of a standard sdcard mount for the emulator / Dream
Mounts the first usable partition of the specified device
dev_mount sdcard /storage/sdcard0 emmc#fat /devices/platform/goldfish_mmc.0 /devices/platform/mtk-msdc.0/mmc_host
dev_mount sdcard2 /storage/sdcard1 auto /devices/platform/goldfish_mmc.1"
Now u need to come to the place in the above lines where its mentioned: "dev_mount sdcard /storage/sdcard0"
U need to change the sdcard0 to sdcard1 (This will make the system think that the phone memory is the external sd card)
Now u also need to change the other line too. U need to come to the next line where it is mentioned:
"dev_mount sdcard2 /storage/sdcard1"
U need to change the sdcard1 to sdcard0 (This will make the system think that the external memory/sd card is the phone memory).
Now u need to press the back button on the ES explorer editor. It will ask you to save the file. Press save and then reboot your phone. Now go to your phone storage and check. There will be 99% chances that the phone memory will show as sd card and your external sd card will now show as phone memory. If that is true then you have successfully tricked your phone into believing the way u wanted to be.
So basically in this process u are replacing the two numbers 0 and 1 in the vold.fstab file. The original file contains the first line as sdcard0 and the second line contains sd card1. They need to be replaced vice versa that is the sd card0 becomes sd card 1 and the sd card 1 becomes sd card 0. Simple.
To change the phone back to the original setting just replace the 0 and 1 as it was in the original file. The first line will be sdcard0 and the second line will be sdcard1. This will bring the phone to its original, factory state where the phone was actually the phone memory and the external memory was the actual ext card.
Thx for reading the post. I hope it was informative.

issue with cocoonjs launcher app on nvidia shield

I'm trying to test a cocoonjs app I made on an Nvidia Shield. I was able to get to my app from an express server I had running on another pc and that worked fine but I'd like to be able to run the app locally off of an SD card in the shield.
I tried putting my .zip onto a micro sd and putting that into the shield but the launcher dosent show anything in the sd card list. I'm assuming that I have to somehow get the .zip file onto the internal shield sd card itself? Has anyone else done this before? Thanks in advance for the help and I apologize if I'm just missing something simple.
The only requirement is that the zip file should be on the root of the SD card.
You can get more infor here:
http://support.ludei.com/hc/en-us/articles/201048463-CocoonJS-launcher-user-guide

Make device SD Card windows bootable by an android app

It may seem strange, but I wonder is an android app able to make the SD Card inside the device windows bootable? I thought of making the SD bootable and write ultimatebootcd to it. I did it through windows, but it would be so great if android can do it!
To make the SD card bootable, you have to modify the boot sector of the card. This can not be done from a standard Android application. If the Android device is rooted, it can almost certainly be done from a native Linux program, or an NDK program.
If the device is not rooted, you can probably not do what you want. As Chris Stratton commented, if the card is already made bootable, you could probably then change for instance what OS is booted up and how.
Say, there is startup code which loads and boots an OS, then you can change the configuration file for the bootloader. A starter: http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/Boot_an_Iso_image
I used Rufus and installed a syslynux on the SdCard from a PC running window 10.then I put the card back into the Moto phone. It's receiving files that I have moved from the internal storage to the card how ever I have not a chance to find out whether they Will open up In the PC or not.

SDCard content exist but cant see them

I am having very Strange problem with my Samsung Nexus with Android 4.0.2. I wrote a simple program which basically create file each time user presses a button. My program is working great on other devices where as on Galaxy Nexus Windows/Mac can not see those files on SD card, but when i do adb shell i see all files on SD Card.
I retest this on another Nexus which has Android 4.0.4 but still same result.
What could be the reason?
You probably need to index your files via MediaScannerConnection. Quoting myself from a blog post from last year:
...the MTP contents are not based on the literal contents of external storage. Instead, MTP contents are based on what files have been scanned by MediaScannerConnection. If you write a file to external storage, until and unless that file is scanned by MediaScannerConnection, it will not be visible to users over MTP.
External storage is scanned on a reboot and possibly on a periodic basis. Users can manually force a scan via utilities like SDRescan. However, the best answer is for you to use scanFile() on MediaScannerConnection to update the media database after you close your file. This will make your file immediately available to the user.

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