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Help My S3 Mini went awol for a day

Bytheseaside

Newbie
Nov 21, 2012
22
1
Friday morning - fully charged & ok. Plug into desktop - no SD card showing. Phone says "preparing SD card". Phone goes to sleep. Later it won't wake up. Tried power button - nothing. Battery out, pause, battery back in. Phone wakes up. Still no SD card showing. Battery half gone already. Processor on 90% plus. I can wake it up from sleeping if I do it after a few minutes, but a longer delay & it won't wake up. To get it back on I have to do a battery out reset. Battery seems to be draining very quickly. Otherwise things seems to work. I check the SD card in my computer - it works fine. Back in the phone, it's still not showing. Phone still says "preparing SD card". I swap SD card & SIM with my old HTC Phone. No change with Samsung. I try to turn it on periodically during Friday without success. Mid-morning Saturday I try powering phone again & up it comes, complete with SD card. I swap SD & SIM back from HTC & try again - fine. The phone is back in business, battery usage back to normal, all systems go. Why?

Can anyone explain what happened please? I worry it will happen again.
 
It has happened again!! I was trying to look at a particular file on the SD card. As the file system was getting going, I pressed the back key - I knew I had been on the phone files previously. The screen stuck on blank. I pressed the home key & got back the home page, then selected Files again. This time I got the Phone & the Card options, but they were grey & there was a Searching circle going round - endlessly. I tried a restart - no help, so I tried a battery reset & found myself back with the "preparing SD card" fault. I left it for a 3 or 4 hours by which time it had drained the battery to 3% & was rather hot! This time I tried removing the SD card completely. Without it, the phone seems to work happily. This morning, with the phone fully charged, I reinserted the SD card - still faulty, still "preparing". Looking at the storage in Settings, the list of the various file types all say "calculating". At the bottom it says "Mount SD Card" & Insert SD Card", both grey. Interestingly, under Battery, the SD card is using 8%. The SD card doesn't register at all either on the phone, or when I plug the phone into the computer. I'm confident the fault is not with the SD card: last time I plugged in a different one & the fault was still there. The phone magically recovered after about 24 hours last time. Fingers crossed...

Has anyone out there got any ideas, please?

John
 
Upvote 0
Thank you, Hadron. I took your advice & removed my 16GB SD card again & did a backup to my laptop. While I did that, I took an old 2GB card from my old HTC phone & put it in the Samsung again. Last time I did this the small card didn't work either, though that was the card in the phone when it did decide to wake up. This time, the Samsung, with the small card, worked immediately! Must actually be a faulty SD card, I thought. However, the card worked fine in my laptop, & is now backed up. So now I had the Samsung, with the wrong SD card, working perfectly. Next job, put proper SD card back into Samsung. In it went - switch on - perfect. The card appeared as it should & all is working again! I seem to be able to fix the fault by putting a different/smaller? SD card in the phone for a time, before putting the proper one back. Removing the card for a time & replacing it later didn't seem to work, but without the card, the phone does work properly.

I'm assuming the phone processor goes into some mode somehow that locks it into this "Preparing SD Card - checking for errors" mode, & until it can perform the same action on another card, it stays in that mode. Giving it a different card to check lets it finish that loop. Does that sound plausible?

John
 
Upvote 0
When it happened again, I tried replacing the 16GB SD card with my 2GB spare - it worked fine straight away. I left it for a day, then put the old card back - still faulty. I put the old card into it's adaptor & plugged it in my laptop. It worked fine there & I did a final back-up. Now I have bought a new 16GB card, Fuji this time instead of SanDisk, & after copying the original contents to it, put it in the phone. So far, it's working fine. Maybe it was just some fault on the SD card that the laptop can handle, but the phone can't. I think I might try the card + adaptor in my camera to see how it copes. I'll just have to wait & see if the phone fault has gone away...
 
Upvote 0

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