Newb having difficulty with new phone. Moto G6 Plus won't let me transfer data to SD Card.

[thontz]

I'm new to Android. Bought a Moto G5 Plus and love it except it's too small. When I was using the Moto G5 Plus, I bought a 128GB micro SD card and used it as INTERNAL storage. Today my new phone arrived, the Moto G6 Plus. When I inserted the 128 SD card in it, it said the data was corrupt and needed to be formatted. This phone did not ask me if I wanted the card to be formatted as internal or portable. It would only format to PORTABLE. Then it asked me what to click to have saved on it. Its a new phone and had only 1 picture and no other types of files. So, it offered three different types of files but I could only put a check mark on pictures because I have no other music files or other files. I did my research and found out that the Moto G6 and G6 Play can format the card as internal but the G6 Plus does NOT allow for that, and I'm furious about that! To make matters worse, I cannot get back to the screen that lets me select what kind of files I want to put on the SD card. I want to select music and pictures but that is not an option right now. I go to settings - storage - and I press on the "Portable SD Card" and then press on "storage settings. I have only two choices. FORMAT and EJECT. No "Move Data" or "Migrate Data" or anything else like that. How do I move the now 9GB of music that I put on the phone to my seemingly worthless, "portable" (not by choice) SD storage? Shouldn't it be a simple option to tell the phone to store my pictures and music on the SD card? There is no screen to be found where I can put a simple checkmark in the box to have pictures and music be stored on the SD card. Also, since this phone does not support "internal storage" for the SD card as an option, can you guys recommend an affordable phone to me that DOES allow for the use of "internal storage" of an SD Card? I really like the phone, but that was a jerk move by Motorola to not allow the best model of the G series to have that feature, but the other two cheaper G models get that feature! I'm FURIOUS right now. Please help! Thanks in advance!

 

[djrakowski]

Once you've formatted a storage card as internal storage, it's locked to the phone in which it was formatted. That's just the way the feature works, and there are no workarounds for it.

You can use the pre-installed Moto file manager to manually move files from internal storage to the micro SD card. Just open the app, navigate to the folder containing the files you want to move, then use the file manager to copy them to external storage. Once the copy is complete, then you can safely delete the files from internal storage.

Use the Camera app to set the storage card as default for new photos.

Unfortunately, I no longer have a Moto so I can't give any more specific instructions than that.

If you need additional help or have more questions or details to share, please join the site so you can reply in this thread. See this link for instructions on how to join Android Central.

 

[Kodak2]

The Moto G5 did allow for sd cards to be formatted as internal, but in many cases the card became corrupt when a security update was downloaded. I guess that Moto decided to remove the option for internal sd formatting on the G6 due to the problems on the G5.

 

[thontz]

They still allow the SD card to be used as internal storage on the regular G6 and the G6 Play, but not the G6 Plus. That was really stupid to not put the feature on the flagship of the G series but allow it on the two cheaper models. I've also just found out that since it's an International version, I don't have any LTE available because the bands aren't supported. I'm pretty sure I'm going to send it back. I really love the layout of Moto phones but I've looked tonight and they don't have a good selection. All of their phones have small screens. The Moto G6 Plus is 5.9" and all of their more expensive phones have a 5.2-5.5" screen. I think I found one that had a 5.7" but the specs were horrible. So, now I'm browsing for other brands.