Help migrating to a new micro sd card

[aproudlove]

Hi,
About a year ago, we got a Nokia 2.2 phone for free when we renewed our contract with our provider, which we gave to our daughter.
The phone is running Android 9 and at the time, I put her a 32GB micro sd card in because it was all I had available. When we put the card in, it asked if we wanted to use it as internal storage, to which I said yes, as I wanted her to be able to use it for apps as well as media.
Now she's running out of space, so I got her a 128GB card as a replacement. I thought I could just put the two cards into a computer, copy or clone the original to the larger one and call it done.
However the 32GB card is not recognised by any computer I plug it into, whether Windows, Linux or Mac, it always wants to initialise the card. I did some googling and as near as I can tell, the phone formatted and encrypted the card when I chose the option to use it as internal storage, so that it can't be used elsewhere.
Can someone please tell me the best way to migrate her stuff from the old card to the new one please? I'm a total Android novice, so any help is appreciated.

Thanks a lot for your help!

Andrew

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Since the old card was encrypted to that phone when it was formatted as Internal Storage, you'd have to put the card back into that phone, then physically transfer the files you want to wherever you want to save them (either the cloud or a computer hard drive). But since you already swapped it with another card (and presumably formatted that new card as Internal Storage as well), it's possible the old card might not be readable any more -- or might cause conflicts, since the phone is now expecting a different card.

 

[aproudlove]

Hi, thanks for answering. I didn’t do anything just yet. What worries me the most is that on the smaller card there is a system folder. Do I need to transfer this over too or will the OS recreate it when I put the new card in??

 

[B. Diddy]

Oh wait, I misunderstood -- I thought you had already swapped the cards and formatted the 128 GB card as Internal Storage.

I've never done this myself, so I can't vouch for every detailed step. However, I think there should be an option in your Settings>Storage menu to migrate the card data back to the phone, after which you should be able to remove the card. Look around that menu to see if you can find anything like that.