Removed SD card and restarted phone, put SD card back in and apps missing!

[Guest kram23]

Hi,

I took my sd card out of my phone to copy some stuff to my pc, while the card was out I turned the phone back on and as you would expect some(almost all) apps were missing. I put the card back in the phone and switched it back on expecting all the apps to be back but they are not, they all seem to be missing. I can still see them in Manage apps either under the Downloaded tab or All tab.

Is there anyway to get them back?

Im using moldovian Mile high mountain pie (not sure what version, might be 7 I think)

Thanks

Mark.

[Guest kram23]

I had the Swift Key flow beta .apk on my card so I installed that and it mentioned that Installing this will replace one that is allrady installed but user data will be saved, so I installed it and it works and my user data is still working as it predicts what I type often. Going to try some other apps from the market and see what happens.

[Guest hydo1]

I don't think that there is a way to get them back. This is why you un-mount before pulling the SD card!

[Guest kram23]

It was unmounted.

[Guest hydo1]

It was unmounted.

Have you been using an EXT partition on your SD card or have you been using the android application manager to move them to the SD card?

[Guest kram23]

Ive moved to a different ROM now (Eco cm9) so I dont need to get them back anymore but would still like to know what happend.

I think what i did was turn the phone off and remove the sdcard then switched the phone back on. Then turned it off again and put sd card back in and turned the phone back on. Lots of apps were missing.

Yes I made an EXT partition a while ago but i didnt install anything extra to tell apps where to go so I am assuming that the MMHMP rom I was using was using the EXT partition for something.

Can you unconfuse me about these EXT partition things, is it for apps them selfs to be stored there or is it some extra ram/rom space for app data to be stored or both or non.

Thanks for any help.

[Guest hydo1]

The reason your apps disappeared is because you rebooted without the SD card inserted, Android will have searched for the apps in the EXT partition but it didn't find them so it will have removed them from the cache so it never looked again once you put the card back in.

I believe (please correct me if I'm wrong) that the EXT partition is used effectively as a second /data partition. That the applications and their data are saved in thus freeing up the /data partition on the phone so that you can have a larger /system partition.

The idea of it being formatted as EXT is so that apps (like Facebook) that don't support Androids native Move to SD function can be confused into thinking that they are still in the /data partition.

That's my two cents anyway.

Edited January 6, 2013 by hydo1