Last night I let my batter run out until the phone turned itself off. I then plugged in the phone for a few seconds before turning it back on. Once the DROID restarted I had an SD Card Failure message with my only option being to format the SD card.
I tried pulling the SD card in and out as well as restarting the phone multiple times with no success, even once the battery was fully recharged.
Does DROID not have an extra bit of power it saves at the end of its battery life to save the SD card? Every other flash memory device does this just so this kind of issue does not come up.
I did the same thing last night. I wanted to see just how much battery life I could squeeze out. However I didn't have any problems with the SD card. Was your phone accessing the card when the power ran out?
Most likely there was an application open that was accessing data on the card when the battery died and when it failed in the middle of the write it corrupted the card the same thing would happen if you were coping a file to the card and suddenly pulled the card out of the machine without letting the write finish.
The phone had been sitting idle (screen off) for a while and I didn't have anything actively running.
Either way, this really shouldn't be a problem. Any flash memory device that "runs out of batteries" is supposed to hold a small charge to make sure the flash memory does not get corrupted in this way. I don't think it should be user error for a phone to run out of batteries with an unknown process running in the background, forcing a full SD card format.
If nobody else has had this issue when the battery runs dry I am going to test it again tonight. If the same problem occurs I will consider it an issue with the phone and/or SD card and take it back.
Last edited by kwegner; November 10th, 2009 at 09:38 AM.
I had this exact problem. I was in the middle of responding to an email, but I was doing nothing that should have involved the SD card. My Droid died, I plugged it in and it restarted automatically, but my SD card needed to be reformatted. I plugged it into my computer, copied all of my non-music files, and reformatted, but I'd be displeased if this happens again. Did you ever do your second test?
I have let it run out a few times and haven't had any repeat problems. This is a major bug, but one that is hard to recreate. Something must have triggered it, I just can't figure out what it was.
I would suggest anyone who has had this problem test to see if it happens again under similar circumstances and return/swap out the phone asap so it doesn't happen accidentally.
...it seems that after I had the exact same problem I tried to mount the SD card on three separate machines (two PC, one Mac) to no avail. I continually got an I/O error. I wonder if the card is actually bad, or if once I reformat (and lose all my pictures, etc) all will be a wonderful picture of awesomeness? Anybody had any luck with this?
thanks so much for the reply. for the benefit of future googlers i was finally able to mount the card using a card reader and an adapter (from microSD to standard SD) that i had laying around.
i then ran
chkdsk /f e:
where e: is the drive corresponding to the SD card. despite a few errors, i grabbed the DCIM folder off of the card and copied it to my PC. most of the files went nicely, but a few of them i had to leave behind to wallow in their own misery.
that backed up all of the photos and videos. at that point, my wifey was bothering me about going christmas shopping and, of course, i'm not going to the mall without my 'droid so i reinstalled the card and then reformatted. so far so good, but it's only been a few hours. all of the apps i wanted to use were still working.
thanks much, hope this helps the future travelers who run into this bug.
The Motorola Droid - the first ever Verizon Android Phone - exploded onto the mobile market with an incredibly successful ad campaign that brough Android to the masses. With a huge and vibrant touchscreen, solid metal body, full QWERTY keyboard, 5M... Read More
Battery running out = SD Card Failure?
