Media Scanner causing phone to continually reboot?

[netarc]

A weird issue manifested on my phone today ... the phone started, upon boot up, to spontaneously reboot. It would boot up within 30s, at which point I unlock it an pulldown the notifications screen (to see what was going on).

I saw several instances of "media scanner running" popping shortly after the boot - over the course of various trials I would see the following messages alternate on the top status bar.

Media scanner running... (system storage)
Media scanner running... (SD card)
Media scanner running.... (USB storage)
Media scanning completed​

...while in the notification area below I'd see the "Media scanning", "Media scanning...USB storage" etc messages periodically appear, along with that horizontal "barbershop" status bar.

The phone would first lockup, then reboot perhaps 3 out of every 4 startups. Several of those times the last message I saw prior to the lockup was Media scanner running.... (USB storage).

I pulled out the 32FB Sandisk SD card, then tried booting the phone several times, and this time no issue - booted up fine, no lockups nor auto-reboots. Note though that I've had the SD card installed for over a week, and the problem only cropped up today.

There were two SD card-related changes I'd made last night: 1) used ES File Explorer to cut/paste ~400MB of video from the onboard camera storage to the SD card and 2) copied 1.75GB of MP3 files to the SD card.

The MP3s I had copied to /media/music (direct from laptop to SD, using a microSD-to-USB adapter), while the videos (MP4s, created by GS2 camera app) were moved by ES File Explorer to /DCIM/Camera.

So at the moment my phone is working fine (4 clean boots), though sans SD card - any ideas why "media scanner" may be choking upon scanning the SD card? Should I move the SD content to a different directory, or just kill media scanner?

 

[Dawn75034]

Netarc,

Did you, by chance, ever figure this out? My phone started doing this yesterday and has continuously rebooted over and over again now for almost 24 hours. I've pulled the battery, I've changed batteries, I've removed the SD card, I've updated my phone programming through Verizon, and it's still doing it. My phone was working fine and then out of the blue yesterday around 2:45 central time, it just rebooted and hasn't stopped rebooting over and over again since then (except when I turned it off). It's like Groundhog Day.

 

[JChapa13]

This happened to me a while back. I started to move some apps back from the SD card to the phone. That seemed to help, but I'm not sure if that was the actual fix.

 

[netarc]

check this thread on XDA
[Q] Media Scanner causing phone to continually reboot? - xda-developers

I ended up replacing my S2 with an S2 skyrocket, on which I haven't observed (knock on wood) this behavior.