Z5 premium sd card problems

[onlyonepinman]

I just got my Z5 premium and swapped my 64gb memory card out of my Z1 into the new handset. The Z5 seems to be having difficulty detecting the sd card. If I go to Settings>Storage the option to mount the sd card is available but doesn't appear to do anything. I get a message in the status bar saying "checking sd card for errors" which clears after a few seconds with no errors, however following this the card is still not visible in file manager and the mount sd card option is still showing. Also none of the transfer data or apps to sd card options are available.

Alternatively, if I select the Erase option, the handset appears to erase the card, it doesn't produce any errors but when the process completes the card still isn't recognised and it still won't mount.

If I put a smaller card in (I had a spare 1GB card) it seems to work fine; I also have a 16GB card which I haven't had chance to try yet. The 64gb card, as I mentioned, works fine in my old Z1 and can be read by a PC without any problem so I'm fairly sure there's no issue with the card itself. I've also tried re-formatting the card using a PC (formatted as exFAT) and also a factory reset of the phone (which should not have been necessary because the phone was new out of the box).

Has anyone else experienced this?

[onlyonepinman]

Sadly not. My wife has a 64Gb card in her Galaxy S4; I think it's the same brand though. I was considering trying it tonight

[drey_p]

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@onlyonepinman wrote:
Sadly not. My wife has a 64Gb card in her Galaxy S4; I think it's the same brand though. I was considering trying it tonight

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It may be worth doing that - you never know, her card could potentially work in your phone.

[onlyonepinman]

And yes, the 16GB and 1GB cards both work in the Z5 premium which is why I think this is an issue with the phone and large SD cards (64GB +).

[onlyonepinman]

I have tried two file managers; file commander and something called "sd tools" or something (I've uninstalled it now) and neither could see the card. However the OS itself does not think that it is mounted because the option to mount the card remains active in the settings menu. On my Z1, it changes to unmount once the card has been mounted.

I understand that the biggest partition possible with FAT32 is 32Gb but considering that my old Z1 can read this card as 64gb without any issues it's very disappointing to find that the new flagship Z5 premium can't.

[thesoupdragon]

It's probably due to Android itself?
Are both phones on the same version of Android?

It might be something Sony will fix in a future update?

[hrym]

I agree.   I think this is probably something you need to raise with Sony technical support.   They ought to be able to tell you whether the phone should be able to read the card and whether this might be an issue with this particular device.  Although Sony are very good about updating the OS on older devices, newer ones may well have subtly different versions of the firmware.

The only other thing I can think of would be to force a fat32 format somehow then, if the phone then recognises the card, format it there and see if that resolves the issue.

[onlyonepinman]

Both phones are Android 5.1.1. I'm just looking into the file erasure because although the Z1 can read the card it looks as though the Erase process isn't actually working. Although I performed an erasure of the card on my Z1, the data is still on the card. I have to wonder if there is some kind of write protection on it.

[thesoupdragon]

There was an issue previously with read write permissions and Sony phones. I expect google deliberately broke something?

Google really doesn't like ext_storage for security reasons.