Corrupted SD Card backhanded Android Firmware

[flamefoxbob]

I have been the owner of this Samsung Galaxy S9 for about 13 months now, and earlier today my battery died. When I turned the phone back on after partial charging, it acted extremely strangely. It rebooted to the secure boot pin screen a few times, and even to recovery mode a couple of times, rebooting about every 3 minutes. But that isn't it; wifi and cellular refused to connect, the screen would not go off if I pressed the power button, the settings app would not open, many other apps barely works, and the device was very slow for the time it was on.
I did the usual troubleshooting steps, clearing the cache in recovery mode, booting into safe mode, uninstalling recently installed apps, scanning with Knox and Malwarebytes, nothing. But, I remembered the day before, inside Samsung Gallery, there was a little text box before my images that said "SD Card has corrupted information, please back up your SD card and consider replacing it." I didn't think too much about it, or screenshot it. Well, to try something, I removed the SD card and booted normally. The only thing I changed that time was the lack of the SD card and voila, it worked fine. Haven't had an issue since, and I honestly think it might be running better.
For my amateur speculation/hypothesis: I believe when Android starts up, it tries to index installed SD cards. The card I am using is an old Samsung Evo 32 GB card, to the tune of 5+ years. Possibly, with the age of the card, there was light corruption in one folder or cell, and Android didn't know what to do with it. I can't find any corrupted files, but I guess Android hung on parsing the microSD card. I just wanted to share my experience and see if anyone had heard of something similar; I sure cannot find anything on it.
TL;DR: A corrupted microSD card in my Galaxy S9 caused Android to lose most function, and bootloop. Usual troubleshooting did nothing, however, removing the card returned the OS back to normal.

 

[Fox Mulder]

I've seen something similar happen before, although not on my s9, where a failing SD card caused the phone to misbehave and removing it made the phone work normally again. 5 years is an eternity for an SD card in a phone and you're lucky it lasted that long without a total data-robbing failure. I recently replaced the card in my S9, which was maybe a couple of years old, because it was getting cranky about saving new files which is a sure sign of impending failure.

 

[flamefoxbob]

I've seen something similar happen before, although not on my s9, where a failing SD card caused the phone to misbehave and removing it made the phone work normally again. 5 years is an eternity for an SD card in a phone and you're lucky it lasted that long without a total data-robbing failure. I recently replaced the card in my S9, which was maybe a couple of years old, because it was getting cranky about saving new files which is a sure sign of impending failure.

Interesting, yeah I know the SD card is pushing it's lifespan hard, but it seems to have all the data there. I haven't noticed any issues since that message and the system failure, but nonetheless. The data kept on it was just pictures from devices generations ago, simply a convenient way to externally store and transfer data. Glad it's fixed, just never heard of it.