SD card corruption and the Y300: bad luck, or trend?

[Guest jackosterman]

Hi folks, Anyone experiencing issues with their memory cards? Y300 here.

 

Long boring story time:

 

I've got a (fairly new) SanDisk Ultra SDHC UHS-1/Class 10 32GB that appears to be on the fritz. All appeared well until I did something as innocuous as reinstall SwiftKey to my data partition (background: as paid apps get stored in /mnt/asec/, they tend not to load at boot or after remounting the SD card, which has grown frustrating). From there SwiftKey began throwing errors about language packs not being installed/downloaded (which is actually a common bug), eventually followed by several unrelated apps reliant on external memory force closing, freezing, causing phone reboots and a bootloop at one point. A manual reboot oft settled things, but unmounting from the PC would reproduce the mayhem. Folders on the memory card like DCIM and Pictures were being rewritten (and consequently emptied) after remounting, presumably because Android was having difficulty reading if they were present and generated new copies over mine. The issues can easily be narrowed down to the memory card, as the reboots, force closes and freezes persisted after restoring a couple healthy nandroid backups. Funnily though, removing all traces of SwiftKey from both my phone and external storage would tend to soothe my phone at first (but not anymore), which leads me to believe it was definitely the original culprit, even if that makes no real sense.

 

I've since popped in an older 16GB SanDisk and restored the last nandroid I left on it. All seems well. I'll be formatting the 32 GB soon, hoping it was simply a bad read/write sequence that caused its corruption, as opposed to the card being physically damaged. If that makes any sense.

 

I'm curious though, if several of you have been using 32 GB cards? I believe that's the max this phone will take, and I know some budget phones will react poorly to larger cards. I've also been using MiniTool Partition Wizard in Windows to format/partition my cards. I know word around town is oft to do it within recovery-- does anyone here actually swear by that?

 

Oh, and to appease my curiosity, anyone know if something so small as a bad app install can actually mess up the memory card? Thanks gents.

Edited November 18, 2013 by jackosterman

[Guest jimbobvfr400]

I had what sounds like exactly the same issue. A format of the memory card solved it for now. I've had my 32GB card since my Desire Z was a current newish phone and never formatted it so I just thought it was long overdue for a format. I guess I'll have to keep an eye on it now somebody else has had the same problem.

[Guest rederik75]

I have a 32GB card, with no problems

[Guest jackosterman]

I had what sounds like exactly the same issue. A format of the memory card solved it for now.

Just curious, in the event our issues are related and as things seem to be working for you so far, what method did you take for formatting, and did you copy over any backed up files afterwards?

[Guest jimbobvfr400]

Formatted in twrp and yes copied everything.

[Guest jackosterman]

All seems in order, after a format. (Or at least, my phone has yet to crash/reboot/explode after minimal testing.) I'll throw in a potential warning, though. I had originally attempted to restored a couple nandroids that had been previously moved to my PC some time ago. Upon returning them to my SD card (post-format), the partition restore order had changed in TWRP 2.6.3.1 (Android Secure was now listed and restored first, System was last, etc). Weird and potentially related side effects followed, like init.d needing to be set back up. Not sure if this has happened to anyone else-- I don't see how moving backups to the PC could cause this, but so it goes. (I ultimately elected to restore a backup held on an older card, before popping the current one in). Anyway, hopefully 'thread closed', but I'll be periodically checking the card for errors via Windows (Properties->Tools); other cautious folk may want to as well. I'd also still be interested to know if anyone else with a 32GB card has experienced similar woes. Perhaps voxpop, as his G510 seems to have been made from pure death (I kid, I kid).

Edited November 18, 2013 by jackosterman

[Guest k0va]

Frined of mine have huawei g300, and phone burned 2 sd cards allredy.

First was cheep sd card, and after that he bought Kinsgston to be shure, but it burned also. So problem is in the phone. 

I have huawei g300 to and never had souch problems.

[Guest jackosterman]

tl;dr: All this happened before, and will happen again.

It's that magical time of the year. Looks like my memory card (a SanDisk SDHC Class 10/UHS1 32GB) got itself corrupted, again. Could not identify the culprit to any satisfying conclusion, although the errors/eventual reboot happened just moments after I deleted a jpeg in my browser's temp folder. I don't see how that'd do it, but whatever. Too lazy to bother reformatting like the last time, I ran chkdsk on Windows and seemingly got things in order... For now, of course. (Luckily, the only data loss I've identified thus far is a random music album, for some reason.)

I'm really curious if this is a case of a faulty card, phone or just plain bad luck. To reiterate from the first episode (just under a month ago), my current 32GB card remains relatively new and I had otherwise used the same 16GB card for months with this phone, without incident.

Just in case it's the phone, and possibly it's deep-seeded hatred of larger card sizes, be warned and backup frequently, folks!

Edited December 14, 2013 by jackosterman

[Guest ZolaIII]

It's not a card size i have a 32GB Samsung UHS1 SD & it works without problems!

I don't know did you mess with security options for filesystem or back write as those things can cause a corruption when reboots happen. Probably it's a mix of a bad luck & not so good card.

[Guest jackosterman]

Hopefully this thread'll die soon, but rather than waiting for my memory card to corrupt again, I just opted to get a new one. Now I've always (fully) formatted my new cards with Windows before using them -- just wondering if that's what you guys do as well? I've read conflicting things online, so I figure I may as well touch base here.