Could really do with some advice / guidance - frustration with my Samsung Galaxy S4

[litfoo]

Hi all,

I switched from an iPhone in April of this year and went for the Samsung S4

It is on the Three network in the UK and came with 4.2.2 pre-installed

I purchased a SanDisk Ultra 64GB Ultra Micro SDXC card - Not too long after using it I would often get ?SD card unexpectedly removed? ? resulting in me having to reboot/restart the device.

I have been putting up with the occasional reboots until?

More recently, I am often getting ?App not installed? when touching the App icon on my homepage (over the recent months, I had started to move some Apps to the SD card to save space on internal storage) ? it appears that the app has completely gone and I have to go back to the App Store to reinstall it

I am also now frequently getting errors like:

? Contacts not responding
? Gallery not responding

Images that I have taken recently (they are being saved on SD card) are either disappearing or appear in the ?Camera? section with ?Gallery? with a broken image

I have recently installed the ?Gallery Drive Sync Pro? app to backup my camera images (old images from SD card have uploaded/synced fine, but recently images appear broken on upload/sync)

And also upgraded to Android 4.3 through a system update.

Would really appreciate it if someone has some previous experience of the above or knows a good solution.

At the moment, I am baffled as to where the problem could be (is the SD card causing all these issues?) and what path to follow to rectify it.

Many thanks in advance

litfoo

 

[Eclipse2K]

That SD Card issue was a well known problem with the Galaxy Note II. It friends two of my friends and one of mine SD Cards. Apparently Samsung hasn't learned and Samsung refuses to admit its their fault.

Those not responding glitches are rough. I've had those on the Note II and I tried everything possible with no luck. I even did a factory reset and I constantly had force closes. A replacement unit is all that fixed the issue. If you do try a factory restore make sure you don't recover any information. Unchecked that box.

In your case remove the SD card and see if the issues disappear. If you have any apps running from the card and its failing you'll notice the above complaints you made.

Sent from my XT1080 using Tapatalk

 

[STSVA]

Most, if not all, of the problems you're reporting are probably related to data corruption on your SD card. I've seen a fair number of posts here and on other forums indicating that Samsung phones/tablets don't play well with SD cards. Some people think it's mainly an issue with SanDisk cards, but I've seen some posts reporting problems with Samsung brand cards. Here are some things you can try (based on reading many threads about corrupted SD cards) - you don't necessarily need to do all of these, but can start with one and see if that helps, then go from there:
Unmount the SD card, connect to your PC with a card reader, and run checkdisk error correction on the card (which the PC should read as a drive)
Format the SD card using the phone or PC (there's also some discussion on other forums about whether to format as exFAT or FAT 32; some people seem to think FAT 32 may have less problems)
Factory reset
Start phone in recovery mode and wipe the partition cache

 

[litfoo]

Many thanks for you both taking the time to respond.

Having done some more research, I feel that I am always at risk of issues with the SD card.

I am happy with the phone, but given that my phone only has 16GB and not all of that is available for storage, I am contemplating going for the Nexus 5 32GB model - I can't be messing around with these SD card issues

Thanks again

litfoo

 

[danhartman26]

I read about issues before I got my S4 in September. The first thing I did was copy the contents of my SD card to my PC, then installed it in the S4 and formatted it. Then copied the contents back to it, and have not had an issue with it.

I think the theory is that the Samsung format makes it play nice with the phone. I hope this helps you out and saves you the expense of a new phone!

Sent from my SCH-i545

 

[litfoo]

I read about issues before I got my S4 in September. The first thing I did was copy the contents of my SD card to my PC, then installed it in the S4 and formatted it. Then copied the contents back to it, and have not had an issue with it.

I think the theory is that the Samsung format makes it play nice with the phone. I hope this helps you out and saves you the expense of a new phone!

Sent from my SCH-i545

I really appreciate the advice, but have already taken the plunge and ordered a Nexus 5

Always having the latest Android version has always appealed to me and with 4.4.1 it appears they have addressed the camera issues.

Also looking forward to using Dashclock widget and all the extensions for lock screen.

litfoo