I had to post this, because my Summit 5G’s SD card became “Corrupt”, and there’s no hard evidence of such corruption. I want to access it so I pull my music off it, but no matter how many times I restart it now it just says “Issue with SD card” without telling me what it explicitly is, and when I select it it says “SD card is Corrupt” and tries getting me to Format it and thus losing over 12,000 music tracks!
Is there some way, or a possible way to, brute force access to an SD card on Android directly and completely bypass this supposed “Corruption” so I can recover data?
Also, there is no application on Android that does this, not even on Google Play Store (Only applications that format the SD card or restore lost data exist)! But considering how far our technology has advanced, it’s worth a shot to try and finally end this whole issue regarding losing access to supposedly “Corrupt” SD cards, and thus extending their accessibility lifespan till they truly corrupt themselves and files get deleted.
This isn’t talked about too much, and every site I went to said that you have to fix an SD card to regain access, but what I suggest, is that we can create an application or something that brute forces access to the SD card, bypassing some of the apparent issues that prevent access in the first place, without a PC needing to be involved.
I do preserve stuff on SD cards, and this “Corruption” can render access normally impossible, it could even render application APKs inaccessible if it’s on that storage medium, including F-Droid itself if it’s in that form on that storage medium (You never know, if you can’t access F-Droid’s site, you would need the APK kept just in case). So this could be something notable to investigate. This isn’t just a situation where FOSS lacks something Google has, this is a situation where neither FOSS NOR Google has a way to brute force access to “Corrupt” SD cards without PC & without formatting, it doesn’t currently exist at all on the Android ecosystem.
My understanding is that if you have an SD card with corrupted FAT/NTFS/ext4/etc, you really need a PC with Linux or Windows to do the low level track/block access to reclaim files, repair FATs etc. I don’t think Android usually gives you the permission to do this. (But maybe with a hacked Rom?)
On the PC there are open/free repair tools like Testdisk, Photorec, etc. These tools are powerful, and can destroy other data on HDDs, it is a good idea to have an HDD setup with Linux just for this purpose. I can recommend Puppy Linux as a good lightweight distro for this sort of work.
If the data is valuable, its worth making a backup image file of the card, and experiment/extract/repair using the image file.
There is a “backup FAT” saved, sometimes Testdisk can reclaim that.
But dont expect miracles, if the FS is badly damaged, you get your media files back in bits and pieces, without filenames.
But, what if there is no PC to do it with? That’s the thing I’m trying to solve here, and what you said doesn’t answer the question. I know an application as I indicated in the main post is possible considering our technological advancement. But, can it be done though on an Android alone?
Well the answer might be “you cannot do it on stock android”, because of the limits imposed by Android on normal apps, preventing the sort of low level SD card access needed to repair it. Also if your SD is larger than your main memory, you cannot make an image file to work with, hence me suggesting a PC. How big is the card mem?
My SD card on my Summit 5G (The failing one) is 128GB, the one on my T901 (Still functioning well), is 1024GB. The devices themselves have less capacity than the SD cards.
Well, I can only talk about the PC side of things here. The point us if these cards are damaged and the standard Android cannot correct this, you do not want to keep allowing write accesses to the cards, it may make things worse. If you had a Linux PC with 1Tb HDD for this you could put the card in a SD holder with a write protect switch on, backup the card block by block to an image file on the HDD, then mount the image, then try Testdisk to reclaim the backup FAT (if it is Fat), and if that fails try Photorec to salvage what media files it can to the HDD. Some commercial PC tools might make it a bit easier, if Linux is too difficult.
But its all non trivial to do!
There are places that do all this for you, for a fee, it depends how important this data is.
The card might even have failed entirely, and be unusable.
Some modern (>=128gb) cards use 2 bits per cell (4 voltage levels) compared to old 1 bit per cell. This is much more prone to corruption/failure over time.
Hmm…So my 1024GB SD card works like the 128GB SD card due to a simple case of having the same bits per cell. Of course, my 128GB SD card is up and running again, but I’ll have to baby it as long as possible till I can safely get the Music out of it so it doesn’t truly become inaccessible!
But this revelation is alarming for my 1024GB SD card…It could suffer a similar fate at any moment…
I have noticed Android is horrendously bad at preserving SD card health. I have never had a good experience with it and honestly to an extent I blame Google.
I mean seriously who else is there to blame Android handles it terribly in comparison to Desktop platforms and the fact it doesn’t have any kind of proper recovery options makes it that much worse.
Here’s to several years of terrible android external storage experience…
I mean if you want to get real tinfoil hat like you could argue Google is intentionally sabotaging it by not improving it in order to compell users to use their cloud storage. I have no substantiated basis for that claim but it sure does seem like something Google would do lol. (Especially considering they just seem to LOVE making the experience worse for people who refuse to use their services)
*But also forcing their user base to surrender sensitive information so Google can dox them whenever they want without government intervention because governments don’t care about us individuals anymore and clearly nothing can be done to stop it
You “simply” need root to do it, if your phone is not rooted it’s impossible to do anything, unfortunately, however much “technology could improve”.
Unfortunately Android phones are not really general computers if they’re not rooted, they’re just toys.
Keep also in mind that SD cards are not a super reliable storage medium, they die relatively easily; and that the file system that Android uses for them* (FAT) is more prone to corruption than more modern ones.