Make 128GB SD work fine on a Moto e phone and probably others

Do not believe it if your phone specifications say it will accept a maximum of 32GB on an SD card. I have an original Motorola Mote e phone. Two of them. Sandisk 64GB micro SD card worked fine, after the now well-known necessary simple reformatting on my PC. Could have probably formatted it in the phone also. No big deal.

On Black Friday I bought a 128GB Sandisk micro SD card at a great price. Reformatted it, from my PC, as before on the 64GB card. Put it into the phone and in the phone's storage settings, "mounted" it. Then, with USB cable to PC, I copied hundreds of downloaded youtube mp4 videos, hundreds of tunes, pdf files, jpgs, home videos, docs, and still have plenty of empty space for more videos.

But -- I soon discovered that it would not show the card at all!

I would get a Notification "SD card suddenly removed." I thought maybe I had not inserted it fully and a contact had jiggled loose. That turned out to not be the case. But I reformatted the card in the phone, remounted it again, then via USB cable, overnight copied all those files and folders again to the card. Worked fine. Until the next day, another notification that the card had been removed. I thought, oh well, this just exceeds the limits of the phone's OS. I'll have to go back to that 64GB card.

------- But here's the good news if you want a monster size SD card on this phone, and presumably other Android devices as well.

I remembered that sometimes PC problems go away if you do a shutdown and full restart. So I simply turned the phone off. Not airplane mode, but off. Then when it was off, turned it on again. Took about a minute to reboot. Wow. There, when I looked at Settings>Storage, was all 119GB in full splendor (for those who don't know, that's the actual usable storage on a 128GB drive). I went to my File Manager app and sure enough, files and folders were all there, perfectly. On a card the same size as my SSD sytem drive in my tower desktop! Oh yeah, hallelujah, thank yuh reboot!

Is there a downside to this simple restore hack? Yes. At least once a day, sometimes twice, some program and I don't know which one, will "suddenly remove" the SD card as it says in my Notifications. So what. Turn off, turn phone back on. No more missing storage. A minor nuisance to having what would cost more than $900 on an iPhone.

Hope this helps others. Just remember that large SDXC cards, micro or standard, are formatted differently, and often come with Sandisk or other files on them also. Just plug the card into your PC and format it, wiping Sandisk's or other maker's file system. The card will no longer work on devices that require SDXC formatting, but should work on most all other SD devices, and we're using it on Android OS phones. A simple hack.