Smart Ultra 6 - spontaneous app loss from home screen folders & microSD unexpectedly dismounting

[cookerdonkin]

Just 5 days after buying a new Smart Ultra 6 and I'm almost ready to thrown in the towel & return for a refund...

1) Phone so unstable - frequent crashes (then red Vodafone logo reboot sequence)

2) microSD card spontaneously dismounting (a few times a day)

3) App "buttons" disappearing randomly from my home screen folders (those apps I've moved to the microSD card)

4) Grey "ghost" substitute icons appearing (sometimes) in place of the colour app icon (again those apps moved to microSD card)

5) Good 64Gb Sandisk microSD was formatted to FAT32 (not exFAT), then loaded with plenty of apps and photos etc from old phone, seemed OK initially, but now phone very unstable. Took microSD card out and ran Windows repair which found a problem and repaired it, but same problems recurred when put back in Smart Ultra 6.

6) When I "lose" the mounted microSD (on random disount), the normal App name (shown in Settings>Apps>ON SD CARD tab) is "corrupted". So e.g. instead of seeing just the word "Asda" against the app icon in the Setting list I see "com.asda.android" and (e.g.) "com.booking" instead of just Booking (for the hotel booking app). No idea where the "com." prefix is coming from...

And then ... the phone sorts itself out and everything is back to normal (and all apps on microSD card are fine)...albeit until the next glitch

Is anyone having similar stability problems?

Would I have been better formatting the 64Gb microSD as exFAT?

Any comments or support much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[hrym]

I saw that too.   Further research suggets that Samsung are giving as their reasons:

It's better to use the card as removable storage and that's what people want

It can't be transferred

When you first insert it, it may be erased unexpectedly

This is mainly aimed at emerging markets where 4-8gb is common for base storage

All that makes sense, as does the argument that cards are generally slower than internal memory.  Someone using a card in this way might be caught out by the non-transferrability, but I'd also assume they'd think of everything being internal memory and transfer content later as if it was.

Obviously, the manufacturers aren't trying to steer people towards a 64gb device rather than 32+32! :smileytongue:

Personally, I think using a card as internal storage has too many pitfalls, but I can see it making small-resource devices a lot more viable.   The Vodafone Smart I referred to had 8gb onboard and I gave it a 2gb card.  I wasn't able to overload it with apps, and I tried pretty hard.

[cookerdonkin]

BTW (& I hope what follows isn't breaching any forum rules/etiquette? Apologies if so) I used a very handy little free/donate utility on my PC to format the 64Gb in FAT32 format (rather than the natural exFAT for a card of this size I.e. more than 32Gb), which some on this forum may not know about. It's been written and posted in GUI and non-GUI format by a guy called Tom Thornhill of Ridgecrop Consulting. It's worked fine for me over a few phone/microSD card combinations, though I do understand the point that if the microSD card (of whatever size) can be formatted by the phone itself, then that should hopefully ensure compatibility.

[hrym]

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@cookerdonkin wrote:
BTW (& I hope what follows isn't breaching any forum rules/etiquette?

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You're fine and any feedback on 3rd party apps/programs is useful.  Please don't post links, though.  I think this one (or something like it) may have been mentioned elsewhere in a similar context.

I do wonder whether this is the root of your problems, though.   SDHC and SDXC are already fudges of the original SD format and a further fudge may well result in a sticky mess, though this one doesn't sound like an inevitable car crash.

[cookerdonkin]

I think I am guilty of trying to turn my Android phone into a "do anything Cray computer" with all my best music and photos and the rest (as well as being a phone!) so I only have to worry about carrying, charging etc one thing...hence the larger microSD card. It will seem like a backward step if I have to heavily prune what I have had previously at my fingertips, but if that's what I have to do to get this stable after trying the various suggested fixes, I'll have to do it.

[hrym]

Do bear in mind that it has more power than early supercomputers!

Though you might need a octa-core device with 32gb of storage and 3mb of RAM to achieve the turbocharging you want, and they come at an impressive price.  The Smart range is by no means shabby, for all that.

[cookerdonkin]

I agree - it is great value for its spec. I'm hoping these are teething problems, so I can bear to let go of my previous phone long enough to get it repaired (a Huawei Ascend Mate with a broken on/off button from my "onedeviceforeverythingstrategy" overuse, which I have only been able to switch on for the last few months while oit and about, by putting it on charge with an Anker portable battery or ringing it from another phone).

[cookerdonkin · Accepted solution]

I said I would provide an update (and I hope closure) on the stability problems I had been having with my new Smart Ultra 6 after applying all your advice...so here goes.

What follows is a long read, so in summary, I think the phone is sorted! I I just hope I'm not tempting fate by making this claim too early.

Conclusion: The phone is now everything (positive) that the spec suggested it should be and I would buy the same phone again, with the caveats I describe below.

So a massive thanks for all your advice on the forum.

Here are the detailed steps I went through (there may have been a better way, but - as a layman - this is what I did):

STEP 1) I tried to Move each app from the "difficult" 64Gb microSD card back to the phone's (Internal) memory by pressing the "MOVE TO PHONE" button for each App (in Settings>Apps>ON SD CARD tab), but as the whole thing was so unstable it didn't work very well (took forever/hung), so I resorted to Uninstalling each app (those Settings>Apps>ON SD CARD tab) from within the Google Play Store. This seemed to work (& spookily quick). I left other "data" stuff (photos etc) on the microSD card.

STEP 2) Took microSD card out of the phone and mounted on Windows, ran a disk check (errors found) and repaired. Took a backup of the microSD to my PC. Put microSD back in phone.

STEP 3) Assessed whether phone stability had generally improved, by using phone as normal (minus the

Uninstalled apps). Did this for a few hours, while accessing the "data" on the microSD card and (e.g.) taking new photos.

Insight:  phone stability much (100%?) improved, felt "solid" and I could read and write (e.g. photos) to the microSD card.

Conclusion: LESS likely to be the microSD card itself OR the microSD card reader in the phone. MORE likely to be one or more Uninstalled rogue apps, which hadn't been handled well by the phone or android when moved to the SD card. And that this bad App handling had (potentially) caused errors/corruption problems on the microSD card when it was abruptly "unexpectedly dismounted" several times while within the phone (albeit seemingly fully repairable when taken out and mounted under Windows, by Windows scan and repair utility). As a layman, this feels like a bit like the same scenario as when we were told NOT to pull a USB stick out of a PC abruptly, without properly ejecting it first.

The next bit was about trying to get back to a fully loaded phone. I was still unsure whether the 64Gb microSD card should have been formatted FAT32 (which is what I had done using the Ridgecrop utility on my PC) or exFAT. I wanted to try exFAT instead. There had been a suggestion on the forum that I should let the phone do the formatting (rather than on a PC) and the phone would choose the format it wanted. But I didn't know where the "Format SD card" option was in the phone Settings menu. I wondered whether if I chose the "Erase SD card" option under Settings>Storage whether this would ERASE SD card and THEN a prompt would appear offering me the opportunity to (Re)Format the SD card in the phone to its desired format.

STEP 4) Took backup copies of the new files on the microSD card (just a few new photos taken etc to test stability).

STEP 5) While microSD card in the phone, ran the Settings>Storage>"ERASE SD CARD" option. After the Erase, there was NO prompt to (Re)Format the microSD card in the phone, so I assumed it was still in FAT32 (i.e. as I originally pre-formatted it in my PC)

STEP 6) Took the microSD card out of the phone and mounted it on my PC to format it exFAT. Checked Properties of the microSD card and found it was (already) exFAT!!!! Can I can only assume the "Erase SD card" option in the phone had silently (Re)Formatted the microSD card to exFat from FAT32?

STEP 7) Put microSD card back in phone and reinstalled (from Google Play Store) all the STEP 1) Uninstalled apps (the ones that had been originally MOVE(d) TO SD card), but this time left these freshly installed Apps ALL sitting on the phone's Internal memory.

STEP 😎 Reassessed stability by going into each of the freshly installed Apps to see if any of them caused problems on the phone. All seemed fine.

Insight: the apps themselves are probably fine.

Conclusion: It is probably moving one or more "rogue" apps to the microSD card that is the cause of the problem. Wanted to find out which apps were "rogue". [I haven't got total clarity on which are the culprits, but I have been able to categorise (in my terms) Apps as either Higher or Lower risk to stability if moved to the SD card]

My thinking was that those Apps which were less sophisticated / dormant until I CHOSE to access them would be safer bets to MOVE TO SD CARD (whatever Settings>Apps said for each App). Those that regularly refreshed (e.g. weather Apps) would be higher risk.

STEP 9) Went to the Widgets screen to see which of the Apps which Settings>Apps said I could "MOVE TO SD CARD" (button not greyed out) had Widgets. Decided that I would leave all such Apps WITH widgets in Phone (Internal) Memory, whatever Settings said I COULD do.

STEP 10) Looked at each of the Apps WITHOUT widgets which Settings said I could MOVE TO SD CARD and identified those which seemed to "have a life of their own" (alerts, refreshes etc) and also decided NOT to MOVE (these) TO SD CARD too. This left me with about 50% of the original MOVE TO SD CARD apps which I felt confident I could safely MOVE TO SD CARD, so I did. The total size of these moveable (to SD) apps was about half of those I chose not to move, so only about 33% of the Phone's Internal memory I had hoped to save was actually saved by moving my "safe subset" of MOVE TO SD CARD Apps to the microSD card.

I am now assessing whether the stability problem has entirely gone and so far it seems so.

I hope I don't have to trouble the eForum on this issue further - fingers crossed!

Many thanks once again.

[hrym]

Wow, that's some pretty comprehensive testing and looks like a nice progression of operations to me.   Thanks for coming back and posting such a comprehensive report.  I've marked the thread as solved for now.

Quite what's causing the corruption/ejection, we may never knowm and let's hope you've nailed it.  Unless OS requirements have changed, I think Android requires cards to be ejected like Windows used to.   I've removed USB connected storage without ejecting it in Windows and it's been fine.   I think the problems only arise if all the write operations haven't completed, which would almost certainly have been the case here.

The "format card" option should be in Settings|Storage, if it's going to be anywhere.

Keep an eye on the dates of app-related data files on the card and also look at internal storage.   If the files are also on the phone, and those are more recent, you can probably delete the ones on the card.   If you delete something you shouldn't the app ought to replace it silently, though you may lose some settings/data.  An alternative is to rename first.