Laptop struggles to bring up files from tablet's sd card.

[Android Central Question]

When I connect my tablet to my laptop, I've been having difficulty bringing up the files in my music folder of the tablet's SD card. It will take a long time to do the search and it's a toss up as to whether it will find and bring up the files or if it will come back saying there are no files in that folder. My tablet has no problems reading any files from any folder, but my laptop struggles - it's really only the music folder that gives me issue, but once it can't find the files in that folder, it then can't find files in any folder, unless I'd been into that folder previously during that particular session. Unplugging and plugging it back in would sometimes work, but of recent, it only works if I also shut down the entire tablet and restart it. What is doing this and what can I do to keep it from happening?

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Which tablet, and what OS version are the tablet and PC running?

Can you just unmount and remove the SD card, and then insert it into the laptop's SD reader?

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[EilonwyG]

My tablet is a Samsung Nook Galaxy Tab A SM-T280, Android version 5.1.1. My PC is running on Windows 10. I have always connected my tablet directly to the computer as I had always been afraid that taking it out and putting it in to my computer would cause it to want to format, or putting it back into my tablet it would want to format. I had an old tablet that would do that.

I finally decided to try to add the SD card directly to the laptop, and it did work without the need for formatting. However, I did it while my tablet was off, as I wasn't sure what it would do if it couldn't read the card, particularly what my music app would do with my playlists if it couldn't find the song files. But it did work. A friend suggested the issue was the laptop was trying to go through too many things to get to the files - first through the tablet and then onto the card. Could that be what was doing it?

I guess if I have to remove the SD card from now on to add new files on to it, I can do that.

 

[B. Diddy]

Glad that worked! It might also be an issue with the tablet being quite old (Lollipop is starting to lose significant support for various apps).