Help Problems syncing droid to PC.

[ChrisMiller]

I am having a problem that is similar to those listed in this thread. Unfortunately, I don't have a solution (and am still looking for one). Here's my issue:
I cannot get my HTC Hero to connect to my laptop (Vista Home Premium 64) as a USB drive. After pressing "mount" on the phone, it will connect briefly (like for a few seconds), then disconnect. Here is some additional info:
(a) It's not the SD card - I can take it out of the phone and read/write GB of info to it without issue. The contents can be read by the phone just fine once re-inserted.
(b) It's not a formatting issue - Have reformatted the SD card in the phone
(c) I have tried ensuring that "USB Debugging" on the phone is checked. I've also tried it the other way (unchecked) with the same results
(d) I've disabled my anti-virus software
(e) I have tried a different USB cable
(f) I have HTC Sync 2.0.8 installed and working. Evidently it does not need to see the phone as a usb drive to work.
(g) I couldn't get the phone's SD card to be recognized on my laptop from work (Vista Business Ultimate)
(h) I CAN get it to work flawlessly on my XP/SP3 machine. However, that's not the machine I need it to work on. The last 2 points lead me to believe this is a Vista issue.

Any help/suggestions (aside from use Win7 or go back to XP) would be much appreciated. I really don't want to have to take the card out of the phone just to read/write to it.

Thanks.

 

[ill]

I had the same problem. The posts above about the top menu bar and pulling it down are the key. Thanks for the help.

If you just got here, follow these steps.

1. With the phone on, and the sd card mounted on the phone (you can see that it has about 14 gigs free, so you know it is mounted) connect the usb cable from the computer to the phone.

2. observe the usb symbol at the top left of the droid's screen
put your finger at the top near the usb symbol and observe that the bar changes to the date

3. pull the bar down to reveal another menu

4. choose usb connected

5. choose mount

on your pc, you should now have access to the card

To unmount, eject the card from the pc, pull down the top menu and select turn off usb storage and you are done. The card will remount automatically on the phone.

Thanks to the previous poster for pointing toward the top menu bar.

Thanks davidpitts. Worked like a charm. Yeah, I have Windows 7 too.

 

[ChrisMiller]

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried what you suggested, but still experience the issue. I was effectively doing the exact same thing by clicking on menu->notifications->usb connected->mount (the only difference being you pulled down the menu from the top...but it gets you to the same place). I also posted this issue on the HTC wiki and found there seem to be quite a few others having this issue. I will post a reply if I can get this working. I've been in contact with HTC, but they have not been interested/willing to help research this yet.
Chris

 

[unsoldier50]

Hey fella's, i dont know if this will work for everyone, but after several weeks with no success i finally have my Droid working with vista 64.

Here's what I did.

1. uninstall motorola driver, and media link from pc
2. use "rededit" to delete the registry off of the pc
3. then I deleted all files in the "LOST.DIR" folder on the "sd card" (this folder is like the recycle bin for the droid).
4. i then connected to my pc via USB, mounted the device and without any other steps it connected just fine.

I hope this helps, all I can guess at is that there was a conflict with Vista and one of the files in the LOST.DIR folder.

 

[aggiemo05]

I had the same problem. The posts above about the top menu bar and pulling it down are the key. Thanks for the help.

If you just got here, follow these steps.

1. With the phone on, and the sd card mounted on the phone (you can see that it has about 14 gigs free, so you know it is mounted) connect the usb cable from the computer to the phone.

2. observe the usb symbol at the top left of the droid's screen
put your finger at the top near the usb symbol and observe that the bar changes to the date

3. pull the bar down to reveal another menu

4. choose usb connected

5. choose mount

on your pc, you should now have access to the card

To unmount, eject the card from the pc, pull down the top menu and select turn off usb storage and you are done. The card will remount automatically on the phone.

Thanks to the previous poster for pointing toward the top menu bar.

I love you! I have been looking for days, nay, weeks for the solution.

I found out it was because nothing is explained the way I understand it anywhere I looked until your message! Worked immediately!

I wish the Droid came with a manual (if it does then I am dumb for not finding it).

 

[MeLikeMeDroid]

what just worked for me was uninstalling the USB devices from device manager restarting the pc and then plugged the droid in and it picked it up right away.

 

[carolinerose]

Okay i started trying this and that and everything seems to temporarily allow my droid to connect to the pc. But i did notice something.

First as someone stated earlier dont even try to plug your droid in without disabling debugging.

okay... Plug the droid in. As soon as the phone realizes what is going on youll hear the chime... Next drag the window shade down and select mount.

This is the important part... Dont do anything else until your computer recognizes the device.

once it does wait for the auto play menu and hit open file to view folders. a new window will(should) come up with the droids mass storage device. once this comes up, open windows media play and all of a sudden it realizes that there is a device. I know some people have probably disabled the auto play menu for some reason or another but without it you dont get to the right window to acces your device. So in other words YOU NEED THE AUTO PLAY.

Maybe i just keep getting lucky with it. But my droid was doing the same thing for the longest time. and the weird part was that i had originally hooked it up the first time with no problems it was when i wanted to add more that it went stupid.

let me know if this helps anyone.

*Caroline

 

[johnlgalt]

Okay i started trying this and that and everything seems to temporarily allow my droid to connect to the pc. But i did notice something.

First as someone stated earlier dont even try to plug your droid in without disabling debugging. I do it all the time on Windows 7 64bit - my debugging is enabled 24/7/365 on my DROID and it connects every single time

okay... Plug the droid in. As soon as the phone realizes what is going on youll hear the chime... Next drag the window shade down and select mount.

This is the important part... Dont do anything else until your computer recognizes the device.

once it does wait for the auto play menu and hit open file to view folders. a new window will(should) come up with the droids mass storage device. once this comes up, open windows media play and all of a sudden it realizes that there is a device. I know some people have probably disabled the auto play menu for some reason or another but without it you dont get to the right window to acces your device. So in other words YOU NEED THE AUTO PLAY.

Maybe i just keep getting lucky with it. But my droid was doing the same thing for the longest time. and the weird part was that i had originally hooked it up the first time with no problems it was when i wanted to add more that it went stupid.

let me know if this helps anyone.

*Caroline

Are you trying to get Media Player to recognize the SDCard directly? I have debugging enabled right now and am mounted and Media player is seeing it just fine....

 

[emilym49]

I have had the same problem with mine and windows 7. I've done everything suggested in this thread but nothing has worked.

 

[carolinerose]

When i'm hooking it up to my pc im not really worried about media player, but it would be nice if it did sync... oh well.

Okay I actually found this sort of work around somewhere. Let me know if it helps...

Read completely then do...

First Enable debugging. Yes ENABLE.
open control panel on cpu> drivers> usually shows as MOTO or something. Disable the driver for the droid.
Plug in phone to cpu.
Mount Phone.
Re-enable drivers.
**Do not close the auto play menu if it comes up. if you do you lose it all. and start over**
**Dont use any options from the auto play menu either**
Then you can use explorer for whatever you want to do....

Finally works for me... my other post was a joke. Didnt actually work. only thought it did.


sorry... but give this a try

 

[carolinerose]

Are you trying to get Media Player to recognize the SDCard directly? I have debugging enabled right now and am mounted and Media player is seeing it just fine....

Sorry. your probably right. I also dont have windows 7 yet. im still on vista.. ugh.

im not sure if i just keep getting it to work once and then having to find another solution.

but i cant ever get windows media player to sync. It will recognise the device but it wont let me do anything with it.

 

[johnlgalt]

hmmm. I may try to sync, but I hate using Media Player for anything to begin with, and with Pandora out there I find I rarely listen to my music store on my SDCard....

 

[Scorpio975]

I've never been able to connect my phone to my PC. I've had it for 6 months & frankly I'm extremely agitated. My old Samsung of 4 years ago connected way easier than my Droid & all I had to do was connect it to my computer. I'm running XP even though most of the problems seem to be linked to Vista. I'm wondering about the steps I'm supposed to even take to get there. One person showed how to do it from hte drop down menu. another person showed me a way that involved making adjustments in settings. I'm perfectly lost. I've been able to get my computer to show a removable drive when the USB is connected, but when I click on it it says, "Please insert a drive into drive (corresponding drive number)." My phone keeps saying "USB connected" and a screen shows up with an Android logo with a USB arm & a button that says "Turn on mass storage," but even after I click it it just turns yellow & says "USB storage in use" then goes right back to the screen before. What am I doing wrong & why is this so hard? I tried to download a driver from this very page, but for some reason I it won't. Anyone have any ideas or maybe the best step by step procedure for 2.2? I would appreciate any help. I've been visiting forums trying to figure this out since I got the phone & there are files I need to get on my phone & they're too large to email.

 

[Scorpio975]

Well, after much toil I finally was able to access my SD card from my computer. The only thing is I don't know that I'll ever do it again. Ninety percent of my media is gone. From reading other forums it seems I might have unplugged my Droid at the wrong time while I was trying to get my PC to read the card. I'm not sure if it is supposed to mounted or unmounted or whatever. I'm not even sure how I do that from the screen with the Android with the USB arm. This phone sucks. Is everytime I plug it in to my PC going to be a risk of losing everything? I love how you get complete instructions and/or warnings when Verizon sells it to you. I'm not sure what to do at this point. I did install an app from the market called Lookout & backed up my photos, but the parameters must be very limited because when I backed up my photos & accessed them tonight, they were not all there. I'm not sure if it chose to back-up only certain folders or there's a severe cap on the number of pics it will save, but it's missing a great majority of them. Does anyone know exactly what I'm supposed to do step-by-step so that this doesn't happen to me again?

 

[cwcheese]

Does anyone know exactly what I'm supposed to do step-by-step so that this doesn't happen to me again?

Scorpio,

Sorry to read you have had so many problems connecting your Droid to PC. I don't know exactly what happened for you last time(s) you tried but here is what goes on when I hook up to my PC. I am currently at Android 2.2 Froyo FRG22D release.

1. Plug the Micro-USB end of cable into Droid
2. Plug the standard USB A connector into open USB port on laptop/PC
3. Droid notification bar will read "USB Connected", then return to normal with a USB or android bug icon
4. Pull down notification bar and tap the item labeled USB connected
5. Tap icon/button labeled Turn on USB storage
6. On the laptop/PC screen you will see one of two things :
   • in Windows XP you will see the normal dialog like you get when you plug in any USB drive asking to load pictures, play media, or simply open folder to view files. I usually choose Open folder option
   • in Windows 7 you will see a dialog asking whether to Scan and fix or Continue without scanning. I always choose Continue without scanning
7. Now you can go to any Windows file explorer and navigate to your Droid SD card - mine comes up as F: due to other devices I have connected - and drag 'n drop files or even open files as you would with any other drive.
8. When finished, you tap the button on your Droid screen Turn off USB storage to unmount the Droid SD card
9. Then you can unplug the cable connectors in any order.
10. Note, I always unmount with the button from the Droid side, not from the PC side where you can pull up the Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media tool from the systray because I like to let the Droid perform the handshake rather than Windows

Thus far, I have not had any catastrophic failure by sticking to this regimented method. There are certainly some variations on those things I list but it's basically just a little more involved than plugging in a USB drive.

Good luck and I'm really sad you had to experience a total wipeout of data. I hope this will be of some value to you.

 

[Ub3rpanda]

One way you can do it if you run windows7 is that you can go into settings, applications, development, and turn on USB debugging.
It may or may not work but this way lets the data on the phone be read like a standard USB Drive.

 

[johnlgalt]

One way you can do it if you run windows7 is that you can go into settings, applications, development, and turn on USB debugging.
It may or may not work but this way lets the data on the phone be read like a standard USB Drive.

And you're replying to a thread that is over a year old

The OS version has changed at least once since then...

 

[ceejay23]

I have the droid 2 and running on windows vista. I am having a problem even getting my PC and phone to acknowledge it is connected. I have tried mounting and umnounting the SD card many times. Any suggestions?