Help Ack! Lost SD card contents after reset

WarnerYoung · Aug 6, 2012

Hi all,

Not sure if anything can be done about it, but I'm hoping someone can help.

I finally decided to do a factory reset to be safe, after updating my Rezound to ICS. Before the reset, I took our my SD card to make sure I couldn't accidentally erase it or anything. I saved and backed up my important data to the card first.

After I reset and activated the phone again, I put the SD card back. And now, it looks like all the stuff I saved on it is gone! I have no idea why. I never checked the "Erase SD card" box, and in any case, the card wasn't in the phone during the reset. I didn't see any prompts after I put it in to erase it or anything like that.

Yeah, I should have backed up the data to my computer first, too, but I thought I was being careful enough.

Anyone have any idea what might have happened? And better yet, whether there's a way to fix it?

picord · Aug 6, 2012

there are files that are also on the internal phones storage..those were the ones that you should of backed up

WarnerYoung · Aug 6, 2012

picord said:
there are files that are also on the internal phones storage..those were the ones that you should of backed up

Maybe so, but the problem is, why did my SD card get wiped? If I made a backup of important data to the SD card, shouldn't that data still be there after a factory reset? Especially if the SD card was NOT in the phone during the reset?

App settings I'm not so worried about. I can always manually restore those if I have to. But actual documents and files, including photos, seem to have been lost.

Sigh. Okay, now that I think about it, maybe a better question would be this: which storage is the phone's internal storage, and which one is the SD card? When I view the file system in Astro, for example, I can see /mnt/sdcard. Inside /mnt/sdcard, there is a folder called ext_sd.

When I originally got my Rezound, I tried copying different files to each folder, and by experimenting, it looked like /mnt/sdcard was the Micro SD card, and /mnt/sd/ext_sd was the internal storage. But after the ICS update, a few things seemed different. Like some apps that were set to save to the SD card would previously save to /mnt/sdcard, but now would save things to ext_sd. Now I'm wondering if I somehow, either I got the two reversed, or if the ICS update switched the two.

picord · Aug 6, 2012

My Mistake I read your post wrong, Sorry..
As far as the important files, I thought they were stored on the internal storage. I might be wrong on this, hopefully someone will chime in on it. I know when I use root explorer it show sdcard and sdcard2, 2 being the sd card.

Cares · Aug 6, 2012

Are you 100% sure you copied it to the right SD card? It needs to be EXT_SD for it to be the external SD card. There's internal storage which appears to be an SD card but it's not.

WarnerYoung · Aug 6, 2012

Cares said:
Are you 100% sure you copied it to the right SD card? It needs to be EXT_SD for it to be the external SD card. There's internal storage which appears to be an SD card but it's not.

Let's just say that, before this happened, I was pretty sure. Before this, if I choose to view Details of /mnt/sdcard, it showed a total capacity of almost 16GB, while ext_sd showed total space of about 10GB. This matched what Settings->Storage was showing.

Now, /mnt/sdcard shows total space of 10GB, while ext_sd shows 16GB. I don't know if the switch happened due to the ICS update, or what. I *do* know that I'm an idiot for not backing up both volumes to my computer before the factory reset, and that the naming of these volumes seems really confusing. On my old HTC Inc, it was very clear that /mnt/sdcard was the SD card, and /mnt/emmc was the internal storage.

I guess it's a lesson (re)learned about backing things up properly. I can only say that I had enough good reasons to think that I had things backed up correctly within the phone itself.

Kyreba · Aug 8, 2012

I'm sorry you lost stuff. However I will say you will have saved at least one person from making the same mistake. I was already figuring I'd take out my sd card before converting to ICS & now I'm going to make sure to back it up to my laptop too.

NightAngel79 · Aug 9, 2012

I hate to say it but I think you just goofed.

The SD card is definitely the internal storage and the ex_sd is the actual SD card

iowabowtech · Aug 9, 2012

To avoid confusion, I create a phony folder on the card called AAA_SDCARD. Because of the alphabetical listing, it always shows up at the top. Helps me to avoid late night mistakes the worst of which is the ever dreaded accidental formatting of internal storage instead of the sdcard.

WarnerYoung · Aug 10, 2012

NightAngel79 said:
I hate to say it but I think you just goofed.

The SD card is definitely the internal storage and the ex_sd is the actual SD card

NightAngel, yeah, I think I did, too.

Thinking about it, I think what might have confused me is that on my old HTC Inc, some apps let me choose where to put files, and if I chose "SD Card" instead of "Internal storage", the app would correctly save to the SD card. On the Rezound, some of those apps would save to the internal storage. I thought maybe there was a way for an app to check which is actually the internal storage and which is external, so I went with what I saw there.

Anyway, like I said, lesson learned. And if I've helped anyone at all with this thread, all the better.

WarnerYoung · Aug 10, 2012

iowabowtech said:
To avoid confusion, I create a phony folder on the card called AAA_SDCARD. Because of the alphabetical listing, it always shows up at the top. Helps me to avoid late night mistakes the worst of which is the ever dreaded accidental formatting of internal storage instead of the sdcard.

iowabowtech, yeah, I finally ended up doing the same thing. I also added a phony folder to the internal storage, but I used ".this_is_internal" and ".this_is_sdcard", because the period puts the name higher up the list.

Help Ack! Lost SD card contents after reset

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