Help SD card storage problem

[Pesky Pixie]

Hi,

Android version: 2.2.2
Network: 3
No taskiller used
Rooted/which ROM - sorry, don't understand this
Issue:

Problems with my SD card saying no space left on it when there is. I have deleted a few files but this does not free up space and I still cannot save new files to it.

So I copied everything to laptop and deleted from SD card, then tried to put it back on again, to see what happened. I am not even able to return everything that I copied from the card, getting the 'not enough space' message again.

Checked 'SD and phone storage' which says
Total space 14.83GB
Available 2.69MB
Internal phone storage available space 15.05MB
Although the SD card is now saying 98Kb available, less than when it was mounted previously.

Can anyone help please?
Thanks!

 

[Hadron]

Hi Pixie, and welcome to AF,

Don't have an answer, but a couple of thoughts and questions:

You are also very short of phone space - if you are not already getting warmings about that you will be very soon.

How much space do you think you used on that card? Put another way, how much space did the contents occupy on your computer when you copied them there? Is it really around 14.8GB used, or much less?

If the card really is almost full, then if there is any process writing data to the card then it could do what you see. I don't know what process might do that, as most apps keep their data in internal memory, but maybe if you look to see what the most recent files on the card are that will give you some idea.

If the data you think you have on the card are much less than 14.8 GB then how long have you had the card and where did you get it from? If the answers are "not long" and "eBay" then you might want to check whether the card is really a 16GB card ("16GB" cards have a real capacity of about 14.8 GB). h2testw is supposed to be good for checking this. You get a lot of "fake" cards from some sellers, i.e. low-capacity cards that have been hacked to report their capacity as larger than it really is. I don't think that's the problem here though, because the symptoms there are usually a bit different - generally with those it looks like you can write OK but you have trouble when you try to read the data back.

 

[Pesky Pixie]

Hi Hadron,

thanks for your reply.

I have had some warnings about lack of phone space - I have downloaded 94.75MB of apps (on internal), 4.2MB on SD which I didn't think was that much. Any idea what might be using up my internal memory? (I'm actually not sure how much internal memory the phone has). I deleted 1 game because of this, but don't want to delete anything else really...

I believe android doesn't have a 'trash' that I could empty - is this correct?

The SD card is 16GB and it isn't a fake card, I've had that problem before - you can't save data to them in the first place as they are not the size it says they are. The data is 10.5MB, plus my music which is 15.16GB (according to the SD card - didn't move this to laptop as it takes ages!) so it is almost full.

What puzzles me is if I delete say 5 songs, surely I should be able to save at least 1 new song to the card - can't understand how deleting 5 songs apparently frees up no space.

 

[Hadron]

A stock Desire will have just 147 MB of internal memory, but that has to hold app data as well as apps themselves. So if you have some app storing a lot of data (an email app, or social networking) then that can eat into your space. Occasionally Contacts Storage can get large too. Look in the Manage Applications menu and sort them by size, and you should be able to see if any are disproportionate. Browser caches etc are also stored in internal memory - there are cache cleaning apps which you can use to clear these (e.g. 1Tap Cleaner) but of course they fill up again when you use the app.

You asked the phone how big some folders were, but did you check for "hidden" folders? Anything whose name starts with a "." is treated as a hidden file by Linux (which Android is a branch off). Check your file explorer app is set to show hidden files, as that might be where the discrepancy lies.

 

[togger161]

After you backed up the contents of the SD card to the PC, did you try to re-format it before restoring everything, or just delete it all?