Question Upgrading my SD Card on a Samsung A54 5g

[PieLam]

I tried upgrading my phone's SD card from a 32gb to a 256gb. My old 32gb card had several folders containing mostly old pix that I wanted to keep ... For some unknown reason, it didn't do right... Evidently I did something wrong, but I don't know what... If you can, please enlighten me. I'm a seasoned PC user, but a noob on cell phones...

What I did:
I removed the old 32gb card from the phone. Using an SD adapter, I put the SD card into my Transcend SD card reader then plugged the reader into one of my Ubuntu PC's USB ports. I went to my PC's file manager where I seen that it recognized the SD card. I went to it and selected all the folders (using CTRL + A). Then pressed CTRL + X (cut)...
Then I removed the old 32gb card from the reader & inserted the new (never been used) 256gb card into the reader. I went into the new card & noticed several empty folders. I was puzzled, but dismissed them. I then pressed CTRL + V (paste). I was then presented with a notification window telling me that the folder already existed. I expected this, so I just opted to replace all folders & files. Is this were I screwed up???

What happened:
I installed the 256 gb micro-SD card into my phone. Only some of the pix are there.
The rest of the pix are only thumbnails. These thumbnails seem all correct, but when I select the thumbnail, the actual pic is not there, only a blank gray square shows up.

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! It's hard to say exactly what happened, but one of the problems may have been using the Cut command instead of Copy. Cutting will delete the source files, so that if something goes wrong with the Paste command, you've completely lost the source files and can't go back to try again.

If you put the 256 GB card back into your PC, can you see the full pics there?

 

[fuzzylumpkin]

I agree with diddy, never cut always copy. The files on the old SD card may still be recoverable if you haven't been messing with it

 

[PieLam]

OK guys, I did use 'cut' (probably shoulda used copy, but I wanted the old, 32gb card to be empty when the operation was complete without having to go back to delete them all. Just wanted to save a few steps).

I failed to mention (oops, sorry) that I pasted the entire old SD-card's contents to my PC's HD.

When I just now re-checked the HD, all the folders & pix are completely intact on the PC's HD. This is why I can't understand why the copying to the new SD-card didn't work

As far as I know, the new SD-card has only has one of the folders (a separate folder named '2020') with all the correct pix.

On the HD, another folder, named 'gallery', has 4 folders named '2021', '2022', '2023', & 'misc'. All these folders are correct, but when I copied them to the new SD-card, I only get thumbnails on the phone.

I haven't removed the new SD-card from the phone to check for the pix..

The entire HD is still intact though... ???

 

[B. Diddy]

When you say the pics are intact on the PC's drive, these are the full pics and not just thumbnails? The best way to be sure is to see how big each image file is -- a full pic should be at least 2 MB, while a thumbnail will far less than 1 MB.

If you copied all the folders from the PC to the new SD en masse, that tends to increase the risk for data error. I find it more reliable to copy things over in batches. You may even want to create the folder on the SD card first, and then copy the image files to that folder (rather than copying and pasting an entire folder as your operation).

To explain those empty folders that appeared on your new SD -- had you already inserted the new SD card into the phone at some point as a test? As soon as you place any formatted SD card into an Android device, it will automatically create default directories (e.g., Alarms, Android, DCIM, Download, etc.). Are these the directories you see?

 

[Mooncatt]

I agree with the idea of transferring in batches. It may even help to leave the card in the phone and tether the phone by USB directly to your computer, then transferring the files that way in case theproblem is with the card adapter or reader.

For future reference, SD cards are impacted by the number of times they are written to. Similar to SSD drives, their life depends on the amount of data written and overwritten on the card. Deleting a file (even by a cut command) rewrites the 1's and 0's of every file back to an empty state. If you are going to delete everything on the card, especially if this is something you'll be doing a lot, the recommended way to do it is to reformat the card in whatever device you'll use it in. A quick format is fine. This will erase the flags that normally point to the specific files without deleting the data itself. Then that data is only re-written as needed the next time you use it, prolonging the life of the card.

 

[PieLam]

Sorry guys, I'm not very familiar with this forum. When I tried to 'quote', nothing seemed to happen.

While I'm in here though, I'll try to answer your posts the best I can.

B Diddy & Mooncatt:

When I click on the thumbnails, I do get the pix on my screen. This tells me that the pic is valid. Although I agree in copying in batches, I feel that this would be very time consuming, tedious, & unnecessary especially given the fact that I've never encountered any such problems in all of my 30+ years of computing.

I will do this though, but only as a last resort.

I've recently (yesterday) learned that SD-cards are subject to being scammed. I plan on testing the new SD-card with some tools that I've recently been made aware of. Maybe this is the cause ???

Scammers re-label an 8gb card as a 256gb card. They are then able to sell the cards with a much cheaper price than their competitors.

 

[Laura Knotek]

Sorry guys, I'm not very familiar with this forum. When I tried to 'quote', nothing seemed to happen.

While I'm in here though, I'll try to answer your posts the best I can.

B Diddy & Mooncatt:

When I click on the thumbnails, I do get the pix on my screen. This tells me that the pic is valid. Although I agree in copying in batches, I feel that this would be very time consuming, tedious, & unnecessary especially given the fact that I've never encountered any such problems in all of my 30+ years of computing.

I will do this though, but only as a last resort.

I've recently (yesterday) learned that SD-cards are subject to being scammed. I plan on testing the new SD-card with some tools that I've recently been made aware of. Maybe this is the cause ???

Scammers re-label an 8gb card as a 256gb card. They are then able to sell the cards with a much cheaper price than their competitors.

Where did you purchase the new SD card? If it's from eBay or a 3rd party seller on Amazon, then there is a good chance it's fake. Also, if the price looks too good to be true, it probably is.

 

[B. Diddy]

SD card scams are alive and well -- see this link on how to test: How to Spot a Fake MicroSD Card and Avoid Being Scammed

 

[PieLam]

I did get the card from amazon, but who the seller is I'm not sure (pretty sure it was amazon). This card was purchased over a year ago. We (actually my wife, her card & her phone) just opened the package & installed it last week.

I'll test the card & report my findings ASAP.

 

[PieLam]

Hi guys!

Please excuse the delay, it's been a busy last couple of days...

As promised, though, the results:
I've successfully was able to put the old photos to the new SD-card. She installed the card & was able to see all of them (phew! I no longer look like a dunce). Thanks in part to y'all's help. My wife is extremely happy & I'm so glad...

The only thing:
The pix had tags assigned to all of them. Of course, none of the tags copied over. I told her that I was completely clueless about 'pic tags'. Any insights on these???

What all I did to restore the pix to the new card:
I followed the link to how-to-spot-a-fake-card site. I wanted to install the Linux version of the tool & afterwards the GUI for it. After reading all the complicated (to me) steps to install it, I decided to forego the Linux version & went with the Windows version instead since it was a much easier install that I could easily understand & accomplish.

When I tried to unzip the tool though, Windows gave me an error because the tool's zipped archive is password protected. After a little research, I learned that I needed the Win Zip app. So, I installed the 30 day trial version on my Win PC. I was then finally able to extract the tool. The tool has 2 tests. I did both. First a quick destructive test, which the card passed. Secondly, I did the long test. After 8 hours, the card passed.

Since there weren't any errors found on the card, the only thing that I was left to conclude is the fact that I initially used my Ubuntu (Linux OS) PC to copy the pix to the card. I thought trying the Win PC might be the way to go.

I decided to try copying the pix using my Win10 OS PC. This involved copying the pix from the Ubuntu PC to the Win PC using a flash drive. Once the pix were on the Win PC, I then copied them from the Win PC to the new SD-card. The pix were now on the new card. With fingers crossed, she installed the card into her phone & voila! Success at last!

BTW, I was able to do all this via batch method as I did initially using Ubuntu.

 

[B. Diddy]

Thanks for the follow-up! Boy, that was quite the process, though.

How were the tags initially added? I'm not aware of tags being a conventional part of an image file's EXIF data, so that might be more of device or software specific thing that wouldn't necessarily get carried over when transferring the file like that.

 

[J Dubbs]

Congratulations on getting it fixed... sometimes victory is sweetest when the battle was the hardest

And that was a battle lol.