"SD card missing" notification upon starting FP3+

Hello and a happy new year,

upon starting my new FP3+ with /e/ preinstalled, I always get the notification that the SD card is missing. It’s a SanDisk 32 GB. The message disappears on its own as soon as I unlock the screen for the first time, so this is no major issue. But maybe there is a way of getting rid of this notification altogether?

Regain your privacy! Adopt /e/ the unGoogled mobile OS and online servicesphone

Did you format you SD-card as additional internal memory?

Hej,

yes I did. When I have a look at “memory” in the settings, it also adds up the internal (64 GB) and SD (32 GB) storage, showing me a total of 96 GB.

The I suppose the following:

You phone is encrypted by default. Your SD-card is now also encrypted. Because of the way this encryption is done, your SD-card cannot be recognized as something useful until you provide your credentials for decryption. This is done when you unlock your phone.

So until you unlock your phone it is missing its SD-card, because it is not decrypted and therefore unreadable.

I think you will have to live with that notification :wink:

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Hej, I checked, and indeed the phone is encrypted. This is a bit strange, because the way I know encryption in Android, you have to actually choose to encrypt your phone and, above all, enter a code for decryption upon starting the device before it does ANYTHING (also, I don’t seem to be able to deactivate the encryption or have the phone ask for a code/password upon starting… any idea why this is so?

Also, unlocking the screen is something different altogether from decrypting the memory storage. So I somehow don’t see how the two are connected. Hmmmm…

This should answer your questions:

If questions remain, please ask further.

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Thank you, this is enough I think :wink:

I everyone,

I just installed /e/ on a samsung galaxy a3 (2016) and had the same issue of missing SD card after reboot. The device is not encrypted though…
For the moment I use my 64gb as external storage, but it would be perfect if I could use it as internal memory. BTW Is that the same thing as adopted storage ?

Few possible reasons :

  • Bad SDcard => probably not, because works as external storage, I ran a couple of tests too
  • Hardware issue => see previous
  • Too big SDcard => Samsung specifications are 128gb for that device
  • Software issue => I listenned to the device with adb logcat but spoted no reference to SDcard… Still, I’m kind of a newbie in android.

Do someone has the same problem ? Or any idea on what it could be ?
This bug is IMO a major one, because it can cause a massive data loss without appeal !
Any suggestions are welcome !

Regards,

Using an SD card as Internal Storage can cause the same thing at any time. Just saying.

Pardon me but I don’t understand your answer.
I’m precisely talking about using a SD as internal storage. What do you mean by “causing the same thing at any time” ?

You are worried about massive data loss because of the bug. And ideally you want to use your SD card as Internal Storage. But using the SD card as Internal Storage might give you massive data loss even without this bug.

Incorporating an SD card into Internal Storage means handing over the integrity and well-functioning (and perhaps even the speed) of the Internal Storage to the SD card, which technically is the (really) weak link compared to the built-in memory in the phone.
If the SD cards fails in this scenario (and SD cards do fail, I have some lying around myself, mostly they became read-only all of a sudden), it can take the whole Internal Storage with it, as many Android users across different devices and Android versions have found out already.

You have one dangerous point of failure less by just leaving it be as external storage.

That is indeed much clearer :slight_smile:
So, if I follow your point, the option of using a SDcard as internal storage, in the way that /e/ (among others) proposes it, is a dead end ?
As a matter of fact, Samsung website tells that it can slow down the performance of their devices. But I still cannot understand what is the point of developing and proposing such a technology without being sure about its minimum stability.
I mean, this is electronics so everything eventualy fails. Here the problem seems to be that an experimental feature is proposed as a stable one.

Or, something went wrong somewhere in my particular case…
Thanks for the explanation !

This feature comes from a time way back when it was introduced as a welcome workaround for severe built-in memory limitations at the time. Technically it was never a good idea, but very limited built-in memory was deemed worse.

Now Google and Android smartphone vendors just don’t seem to dare to throw this feature out for good because users got so used to it.
Interestingly, the simple choice to use an SD card as Internal Storage was missing in the initial stock Android 9 release on the Fairphone 3 (this topic is Fairphone territory afterall :wink: ), but sadly it was reintroduced with an update later, and the initial stock Android 10 release then introduced a serious bug (different from your one) which made quite some users suffer data loss and/or problems operating the phone.

I guess this feature will haunt Android smartphones still for some time to come :slight_smile: .