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Saturday, 21 February 2015 22:00

How I repaired missing drives on my Samsung S2

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The problem

Both my internal and external SDCards dissapered on my Samsung s2. The external SD Card when I removed it and put it in my windows PC it read normally and had no errors.

Cause

I do not know what the exact cause is but possibly one of the following, but you should consider that both of my SD Cards stopped working.

  • Virus
  • Corrupt file system
  • 3rd party App
  • Faulty Hardware

So Basically it appears that the partitions are mounted but the filessytem that is mounted is corrupt so it almost appears as if they are not mounted.

Solution

After days of research I did the following to get my SD Cards to work

External SD Card (sdcard1)

  • I copied the stuff of the card to my windows PC
  • Formatted the card in my windows PC as FAT32 (or whatever its format was)

    If this does not work, change its type FAT32/extFAT and see if it works and then change back again. Only CM11+ supports extFat

Internal Card (sdcard / sdcard0)

This is more tricky because it cannot be removed and this solution is currently the best I could come up with

  • Boot in to clockworkmod(CWM)
  • Format the sdcard via CWM by doing the following:
  1. ‘mounts and storage’
  2. ‘format /sdcard’ (if unsure remove your external SD Card)
  3. Select default (unless you know what your file system is)
  • Do file recovery on the newly visible drive to recover your files
  1. DiskDigger – Use on the phone itself. The free version will recover images and .mp4 to a selectable location ie your external SD Card. Seems Quite Good
  2. Windows Based Recovery – Mount SD Cards as USB Mass Storage
    (possibly run this from CWM), then runt he software

Research

These are my notes on all of the googleing and trying of different solutions

Works (or partially works)

Stuff That Does Not Work

  • Upgrading the installed version of CM/Android – The problem persists exactly the same
  • updating the ROM does not fix the missing internal SD Card issue (cyanogen updates all keep the current files apps etc..)
    useful if you cannot boot you can do a repair install.
  • wiping system partition + re-install of CM
  • these apps make no difference to fixing the issue
    • mount /system (rw / r0)
    • sd card auto remount w/ad
    • sd card check

Stuff That Might Have Merit – But I possibly did wrong!

  • possibly delete the mount points before recreating them

Stuff To Try

UseFul Apps

  • DiskDigger for android – This can be useful for a couple of reasons
    • Can be used to show mount points and their mappings to devices
    • Recover files from damaged partitions. The partitions need to be mounted and the free version does images and mp4 videos. It should be noted it does not recover folder structure
  • DiskUsage – shows you where all your space is being used
  • Diskinfo - this apps shows disk info mounted and unmounted. Excellent for disk diagnostics

Other Notes

Misc

Terminal

The terminal is a powerful tool to be able to help diagnose partion and disk issues

Useful Terminal Commands

  • cd ..   (notice space after cd)
  • umount (notice no 'n')
  • cd /mnt
  • cd mnt
  • mount (with not switches shows the active mounts)
  • cat /proc/partitions – shows partitions
  • df – shows file systems
  • fdisk – perfom actions on the disks and partitions
  • fsck - ? possibly does disk repair, not native to android?
  • dev_mount – device mounting command, might not be readily available in terminal
  • df - lists all partitions
  • mount – (without any switches) show all mount points
  • rmdir
  • rm

Mounting

** add websites where appropriate to my links directory

Read 1672 times Last modified on Saturday, 21 February 2015 22:04
Published in Android
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