Had SD card formatted for internal use, rebooted phone and now can't access files.

[AC Question]

So I had my SD card set up for internal storage but ran into some issues and had to reboot the device to factory settings. I thought that the SD card would still be recognized after the reboot but I'm being instructed to reformat the card. Is there any way to recover my files or are they encrypted to that specific install of android?

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! When you say "reboot the device to factory settings," I assume you mean a factory reset. "Reboot" means simply powering the phone off, then powering back on again. Factory reset means wiping the whole phone and starting from scratch. If you did a factory reset, then the data you had on the SD card was wiped as well.

 

[anon(9983233)]

Yep. In this instance, I would have removed the MicroSD card before dong the factory reset.. but once the MicroSD card was replaced/reinstalled back into the phone, would the phone recognized the card & it's data..

 

[B. Diddy]

but once the MicroSD card was replaced/reinstalled back into the phone, would the phone recognized the card & it's data..

I don't think the phone would recognize it, because when it's formatted as internal storage, it's encrypted to work with that device only. Factory resetting the phone is kind of like making it a new device, and I would think the phone would lose the encryption key along with all other data during the reset. According to this article:

"The platform randomly generates an encryption key for each adopted device, and that key is stored on the internal storage of the Android device. This effectively makes the adopted media as secure as internal storage. Keys are associated with adopted devices based on the adopted partition GUID. The adopted device is encrypted using dm-crypt configured with the aes-cbc-essiv:sha256 algorithm and a 128-bit key size.

The on-disk layout of the adopted device closely mirrors the internal data partition, including SELinux labels, etc. When multi-user is supported on the Android device, the adopted storage device also supports multi-user with the same level of isolation as internal storage.


Because the contents of an adopted storage device are strongly tied to the Android device that adopted it, the encryption keys should not be extractable from the parent device, and therefore the storage device can't be mounted elsewhere."