Android suddenly can't read FAT

Rurouni

Veteran
Yesterday, my phone overheats, thus shut itself down. When turning on the phone, it knows that a mSD card is inserted but it won't mount. The card use exFAT. I tried to insert another card to check whether it was the card or the phone, but the card also can't be mounted (it use FAT32). I thought somewhere in the phone, the mSD interface got busted. But then I tried to format the card using NTFS and amazingly, it did mount even if the size reported as 0! After that I tried to format the card using EXT4 and it works!
Now I know at least the hardware isn't busted, but damn, I want my FAT back. Tried to search the net and found no answer. Probably I need to reflash the ROM to gain the ability to use FAT, but I don't want to do it.
Anyway, it is just a rant. Right now I tried to format/partition my main card to EXT4. My only problem is I use windows and I don't think I can write to EXT4 partition from Windows, thus my plan is to copy the card to my HDD, format it to EXT4, then copy the data back from my PC to my phone. I might tried Linux on VM....
 
Wouldn't know what's causing your problem but why not install a FTP server app on your phone and copy files over wifi? Shouldn't that make the filesystem irrelevant?

That's what I did on my phone after the HTC usb driver decided it just doesn't want to work on my pc anymore.

My sd card is formatted as fat though.
 
I intended to do that. Format the sd card as ext4 then using ftp from PC to Android... that was before I found that ext2fsd can be used to read/write ext4 partition in Windows.
 
from my experience transferring a lot of files wirelessly from my PC to my phone (a lot as in a total of more than 30GB with thousand of files), it was painfully slow.
 
This is FAT-shaming!
Let's boycott Google!
 
I don't mind boycotting Google for practically making mSD useless, but I read that they will bring back support of using mSD for installing apps in Android M (6?). Since the storage will be encrypted if you choose to use this feature, hopefully they also remember to make an easy way for user to upgrade their mSD card (like going from 32GB to 64GB). Maybe using OTG or something.

Anyway, since I need to use something other than FAT (thus repartition and reformat the card), I took the time to make a 2nd partition for Link2SD to use (so I can move apps to SD). I felt a noticeable improvement on my phone performance, probably because now the internal storage has a breathing space. Before I was constantly uninstalling apps, only for the extra space to be filled with Google own data (maps, chrome) or Tapatalk data or some other apps filling it. The annoying thing is exactly because it is treated as data and not cache, thus when I delete the data, I also delete my profile from the apps, thus need to re-enter it. Having said that, I just check the Tapatalk app info and apparently in the latest version it store the unimportant data to cache, thus I can trim it without removing my profile.
 
Something must be wrong on your phone because on my phone apps don't pile up their data.

I'm not too bothered by not being able to install apps on a sd card. IMO sd cards are good for storing music, video, photos etc. With the exception of the really budget phones most phones have plenty of storage these days. Unless you install games you need to install quite a lot of apps to fill op 16 or let alone 32gb. Pretty sure 99% of the apps are far below 100mb.
 
Btw, I noticed a big downside in using ext partition for your external storage. Android currently can use external storage for storing data. For example, a camera app can use external storage to store photos. The catch is that when you uninstall the app, the photos will also be uninstalled (but you can move manually from the android folder on your card). The downside isn't that. The downside is that since ext partition has permission for each files/folders, when an app does use external storage for data, the one that create the folder is root. So right now the app that want to use the folder to store their data can't actually use it (access denied) because the app didn't have root permission. If you use fat, since it doesn't have permission, thus it didn't have that problem. Of course since I'm rooted I can change the permission individually, which then came this question...

Can I change the permission for all files/folders at the same time? Preferably within the android itself. From my googling efforts, I believe you can do it from Linux. I tried some command from terminal with SU, but it failed.

Maybe I should just wipe the phone and start over....
 
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