Google’s Nexus One auto-upgraded a few weeks ago, to Android 2.2
It immediately broke itself. It was no longer able to use the SD card.
As a side-effect, it was impossible to install any applications. Making this a very expensive, very heavy, very slow excuse for a mobile phone.
The error was that the SD card permanently unmounted itself, with a message in status bar “SD card can now be safely removed”, accompanied by an error if you tried to install anything: “your SD card is unavailable or missing” (or words to that effect.
Factory-reset of the phone? Still broken.
By fiddling around, I eventually found the solution (and you’re probably not going to like this): Format the SD card.
Yep. It seems that Google changed something between Android 2.1 and 2.2 that – in some cases – makes it unable to read the SD card any more.
For the record, other things I tried include: remove the card physically and reseat; dismiss the error messages and try again; install apps from private sources (e.g. our own apps we wrote).
6 replies on “Nexus One / Android 2.2: If your SD card stops working”
I guess I should be happy Verizon hasn’t upgraded the Droids to 2.2 yet…
The update is 100% worth it – the claims to have sped-up the JVM by “a factor of 5” look reasonable (real-world apps are 2-3x faster in general use; my own arcade game got noticeably faster instantly, and the small delay you used to get when typing on the keyboard has vanished)
It’s just a pity that the in-house testing doesn’t seem to have caught all the issues.
There’s always bugs, and I found no-one else with the same problem on google.com, so I suspect this is a rare one. But it’s a pain that there’s no “known bugs list” or similar (c.f. Firefox, where you can go and CHECK what bugs a release has BEFORE taking the risk of downloading it :))
[…] Android 2.2 has a nasty bug where it disables the SD Card on Google Nexus One phones. […]
my g1 seems to have the same issue
Guys, have a good google on this. I have a HTC Desire that did this, and all you have to do is plug the SD Card in to your PC and run the Check Disk tool on it, with the ‘Fix Errors Automatically’ box ticked, and wow!! It works again!! Saved my day anyhow… Cheers!
A big thanks to checker, you solution worked a treat to the SD card problem, it would only work in read only mode until I used disc check. Well pleased, thanks again. HTC, HD2 running android 2.2.