SD Cards failing in Galaxy S3: Samsung's insane response.

So recently I purchased a 16G Lexar MicroSD card. I was previously using a 2G MicroSD that came with my old LG Phoenix. Primarily I only needed 2G of memory because I would take my photos off of the SD card and then upload them to my computer. I figured after awhile this became tedious so I went out and bought the new Lexar MicroSD card. I went home and transferred all of the old photos from my computer onto the card as well as ones that were previously on the 2G MicroSD. Mind you I have never had any issue with the 2G MicroSD card.

After awhile, maybe days after I moved all of my photos onto the new 16G MicroSD card, I noticed as I was looking through my pictures, they became chopped up and the colors went all haywire on the photo itself when I scrolled through them. If I were to take a new photo or video, it would randomly cause this "chopping" of photos that were already taken. It would randomly go back and forth between having the normal picture and then sometimes pixelating the resolution, changing colors, chopping up the photo, etc.

So this morning, I woke up to "MicroSD card ejected". I was like well that sucks. I didn't take all of my new photos off yet. Then I did a hard reset by pulling the battery, removed the SD card, and was having no luck with the phone or my computer reading it. All of the sudden it started working again... but it's chopping up the photos again as I look through them.

I feel as if the card is about to die permanently at any time and I've felt this way since I've bought the card. I have been using Dropbox as a crutch to sync my photos if the card dies. It just doesn't make sense that I've never had this problem with my old 2G MicroSD card that came as a starter card with an older phone...

This also makes the argument null and void that it's only Sandisk cards having issues on the Galaxy S3.
 
I wasn't going to post as my story seemed run of the mill until tonight.

I was using a Kingston 64GB Class 10 card (SDCX10/64GB) in my Samsung Galaxy S3 since the middle of January and hadn't encountered any issues. I had previously read articles about corrupted SD cards with the S3 which is why I got the Kingston and avoided the Sandisk.

Last Friday my phone seemed a bit slow so I powered it off and then back on again. When it came back up it said there was an issue with the SD card and it needed to be reformatted. I should have known better and taken regular backups but I wasn't that fussed about the drunken photos that i'd lost, more annoyed about not having any music for the journey home.

Anyway, enough of the background info. I powered off the phone, removed the card, reinserted, powered on, repeat, still no joy. Put it in my work PC (Windows 7 Enterprise), nothing. It showed in Disk Management as raw with the option to format it. I did some research and found several data recovery programs and they were all PC so I booted my Mac into the bootcamp Windows 8 partition. Same as Windows 7. Installed and ran the numerous different data recovery programs. All of them either hung halfway through recovery or completed but failed to find anything. I had been running the scans overnight to no avail so when I got home tonight I just booted into OS X with the card still in the laptop reader. To my surprise it showed on the desktop and when I opened it the whole folder structure was there. I was able to browse it as if nothing had happened.

I successfully copied the 24GB of data to my local drive and checked it wasn't corrupted. I played a video, listened to a track and all my photos had correctly rendered thumbnails.

I am now securely erasing the SD Card through disk utility on the mac and will give it a go in the phone and see what happens. It was FAT32 so I'm now going to try EXFat.

I have no idea why the Mac could read it but nothing else could. I suspect the MBR was corrupted in my case and the data was all there but the card was reporting it was RAW. Either way, I thought I would post this in case it can help someone who has a lot of photos that are dear to them that they don't want to lose.

To be on the safe side I think I will turn on Google+ auto photo upload as from what I have read it's unlimited storage if you allow it to compress the photos or 15GB shared storage across all Google account data if you upload full size photos.
 
I wasn't going to post as my story seemed run of the mill until tonight.

I was using a Kingston 64GB Class 10 card (SDCX10/64GB) in my Samsung Galaxy S3 since the middle of January and hadn't encountered any issues. I had previously read articles about corrupted SD cards with the S3 which is why I got the Kingston and avoided the Sandisk.

Last Friday my phone seemed a bit slow so I powered it off and then back on again. When it came back up it said there was an issue with the SD card and it needed to be reformatted. I should have known better and taken regular backups but I wasn't that fussed about the drunken photos that i'd lost, more annoyed about not having any music for the journey home.

Anyway, enough of the background info. I powered off the phone, removed the card, reinserted, powered on, repeat, still no joy. Put it in my work PC (Windows 7 Enterprise), nothing. It showed in Disk Management as raw with the option to format it. I did some research and found several data recovery programs and they were all PC so I booted my Mac into the bootcamp Windows 8 partition. Same as Windows 7. Installed and ran the numerous different data recovery programs. All of them either hung halfway through recovery or completed but failed to find anything. I had been running the scans overnight to no avail so when I got home tonight I just booted into OS X with the card still in the laptop reader. To my surprise it showed on the desktop and when I opened it the whole folder structure was there. I was able to browse it as if nothing had happened.

I successfully copied the 24GB of data to my local drive and checked it wasn't corrupted. I played a video, listened to a track and all my photos had correctly rendered thumbnails.

I am now securely erasing the SD Card through disk utility on the mac and will give it a go in the phone and see what happens. It was FAT32 so I'm now going to try EXFat.

I have no idea why the Mac could read it but nothing else could. I suspect the MBR was corrupted in my case and the data was all there but the card was reporting it was RAW. Either way, I thought I would post this in case it can help someone who has a lot of photos that are dear to them that they don't want to lose.

To be on the safe side I think I will turn on Google+ auto photo upload as from what I have read it's unlimited storage if you allow it to compress the photos or 15GB shared storage across all Google account data if you upload full size photos.

I don't think exfat will work, android as well as other linux systems don't have support for it.

Sprint GS3 Running TN's Msg and Chubbs
 
I've been having trouble with my SD card for several months, mostly I would get messages that the card is damaged, but it didn't seem to stop working. And in the last month or so every time I unlock my phone it now tells me it is preparing the SD card and some other message. Then yesterday I started getting the message that all of you apparently have received, the SD card is blank or damaged. It has even offered to allow me to format the card. Then it will just not mount the card. In my case there hasn't been any damage and my files are still intact, but I have to turn the phone off and on again before it will mount. It got really bad when I switched ROM's and I think the problem got worse since switching to 4.2.2 ROM's. Seems to me it is a software issue. I switched back to LiquidSmooth 4.2.2. and the problem isn't as frequent.
 
I faced the same problem with my S3.

My 32 GB external micro sd card went blank all of a sudden.

I tried to format through my PC but windows could not format it.

My PC reads the capacity of the card as 31MB instead of 32 GB.

I stored many photos and videos which are invaluable to me.

If Samsung can find any solution, please inform on my e mail.

I am using Note-II now and worried about my memory card and the content.

Regards,

Chetan Pandya
 
It just happened to me, too. I have a Galaxy S3 and was using a Kingston 16 GB microSD. I couldn't get anything off it, even in a laptop card reader. I had to reformat the card. I'm not too upset because everything was backed up to the cloud. It's just annoying. I've had the phone for about a year and this is the first time I've had this problem. I'll try that Developer Tools -> Protect SD Card trick.
 
Try booting into Linux from a live CD or USB. The distro doesn't matter, as android support is universal. Linux has a program called gparted which you should be able to use to see what's going on.

The sdcard may recognize automatically in Linux as well. Really if you don't use your card on your PC, your best bet would be to format it to ext4. Android natively supports it and sdcards run best with it as their fstype.

As I mentioned though, it won't recognize in windows based PCs, without 3rd party software.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2
 
You can add the Galaxy S4 to the list. Mine just killed a 32 GB SD card (Monster Digital, Safari Series)... Samsung, I believe we have a problem!
 
Is there anybody here having problems with SD cards that WERE NOT MADE BY SANDISK?

I just lost a 16GB card from Kingston in my GS3. Prior to that, I was only using Sandisk and lost 4 of those to two different GS3. I bought them all from Amazon in retail packaging. I've read articles pointing blame to the card manufacturers, but now have confirmed it's not just limited to Sandisk. The cards last for several months before the suddenly "die" according to the phone.
 
I had this problem with a class 10 32gb micro sd on my S3. I found a recommendation on the XDA developers forum. They suggested a piece of free software called Testdisk and Photo Rec ( TestDisk Download - CGSecurity). I downloaded it and followed the instructions. I used photo rec to recover all my photos, videos and PDFs. I then used test disk to recover the partition. It then became visible to my computer. and much to my amazement and delight,when I put the micro sd back into to the phone, it recognised it and it is working again. I will be backing it up much more frequently now than I was but this software was really helpful. I used and old XP isolated XP machine just in case but none Of my security software flagged any problems.
 
Thanks for the tip. We will try Testdisk tonight. My son's Samsung 8gb SD card just went bad on teh Galaxy S3. He was viewing photos he just took and then a couple of hours later, the phone did not recognize the card and wants to format it.
 
I've had a lot of experience of this problem, so I'll keep it short. I've now had four Galaxy Note 2 phones. Three of them definitely had this issue, frying SD cards regular as clockwork after about six months. The fourth actually died from a bad screen controller but I'm sure it would have fried SD cards too given long enough. SD cards have been both Kingston and SanDisk.
 
In just two - 2- days, I've gotten the dreaded SD-card damaged error status on BOTH my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 AND my 4 months old Galaxy S3! Do I want to reformat?

Tried reformatting the SD-card in my Tab, but it's still recognized as "damaged".

Now, what to do? This is evidently occurring too frequently for Samsung products to be random incidents.
 
This problem stinks for anyone who actively uses micro sd cards. I got so frustrated that I eventually went back to using an iPhone. I went through 2 S3 phone replacements and tried 3 different sd card (Sans disk, Kingston, pny) manufacturers.
 
I have not read all the posts so I apologise if this has already been said.

I read this site, Samsung Galaxy S3 fault is caused by SanDisk memory cards | CNET UK

I then contacted SanDisk support, SanDisk Contact Information, and pointed them to this site, they confirmed the issue and that it is has been resolved, they sent me details on how to get a replacement for my (now dead) sd card which has been showing lots of the same issues others have reported on this site.

I will update once I have my new card.
 
So is this issue still happening for S3s? I'm looking at finally get a 32gb micro sdhc card for my S3 and so far, the sandisks are the cheapest out of the 3 that I looked at which are sandisk, samsung and sony. Of course, I'm worried about sandisk since they are the ones in the spotlight for the last few months about sd cards failing with the S3. Should I just fork a little more money on the samsung or sony cards instead?
 
So is this issue still happening for S3s? I'm looking at finally get a 32gb micro sdhc card for my S3 and so far, the sandisks are the cheapest out of the 3 that I looked at which are sandisk, samsung and sony. Of course, I'm worried about sandisk since they are the ones in the spotlight for the last few months about sd cards failing with the S3. Should I just fork a little more money on the samsung or sony cards instead?

I have no idea if it's still happening. All I can say is knowing that this issue was prevalent, I purchased a 32 GB Samsung SD card and couldn't be happier with it. And if an issue arose during the whole process, I only had one company to point mt finger at. Some things are just worth spending a little more on and for something I hope to have for at least a few years, I just couldn't worry about the price.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I747 using Tapatalk 4
 
Absolutely still happening. My hubby and I both just purchased brand new s3's and have had them no longer than a week. He had a PNY 8gb card and I had a Samsung 8gb card. Both were fried. I plugged the samsung into an adapter and it was readable by the computer and used Zero Assumption Recovery program and recovered my files. Unfortunately, my hubby's card just says blank card or unsupported file format and is unrecongnizable.
 

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