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SD card keeps asking for formatting

anshul1104

Lurker
Jul 19, 2017
9
0
I have recently changed phones, my sd card was part of internal storage on my previous phone(moto g3 turbo) and now when i want to use it on my new phone(galaxy s7) it keeps saying that you have to format the card first then you can access it.
Can someone tell me the solution of this, I don't want to loose all my data.
Plz help.
 
I have recently changed phones, my sd card was part of internal storage on my previous phone(moto g3 turbo) and now when i want to use it on my new phone(galaxy s7) it keeps saying that you have to format the card first then you can access it.
Can someone tell me the solution of this, I don't want to loose all my data.
Plz help.

Put your files in a safe place so you can retrieve them later via cloud via Dropbox via Google Drive or a folder on your laptop or PC. Remove all you want to keep to either of those places of your choice. Then go ahead and format your SD card and put them back when your done.
 
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Did you factory reset your old phone. If you didn't, your old phone may still hold the encryption key, which is used for adoptive internal storage on the SD, and you might get your data back.

And if you did factory reset your old phone, the data on the SD is basically white noise, unless you got a supercomputer and a billion, billion years to spare.
 
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no, i didn't format the phone.
And how do I access the key and get the data, can u plz explain it to me step by step.?

If you didn't and as long as the SD hasn't been written to or corrupted. By putting it in the old phone should show the data that's in it. And if that doesn't recognize it, think that's it, data is gone forever.
 
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When using SD cards as adoptable storage, they are encrypted and mounted as an internal partition so they can only be used in that device. There should be a big huge warning when setting this up that you should NEVER remove the sd card from the phone unless your data is backed up off the phone. SD cards are too fragile and/or sensitive to use as removable storage, IMHO.

Theoretically, you should be able to take the card out of the phone and reinsert it without issue, but it will be completely useless in any other device or a card reader, so there's really no reason to do that anyway. It's encrypted. Unfortunately, depending on how you tried to read it in the other devices or a PC card reader, even the process of trying to access it can write to the card corrupting it's original encryption and making it unrecognizable to the phone it's supposed to formatted for. That's what I suspect has happened to your card. If that is the case, I'm afraid the data is lost.

It could also be a failing or failed card, which wouldn't be any better news.

You do have one possibility. If your phone doesn't particularly like hot-swapping sd cards you could try this - remove the sd card, power down the phone, put the sd card back into the phone and then power it up. If you're lucky, it will mount properly as adopted storage. If that doesn't work ... well, :(
 
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