Usb storage damaged????

[Anonymous]

Hello,

The other day at work i i was on my phone and a messege came up on my status bar (i have a galaxy s2) and the messege said usb storage damaged 'it may need reformatting'  It says my phone is using my sd card as mass storage and now it wont let me use my camera, my music and i cant view my picture gallery.

I have many photos on my phone all of them memories so i really dont want to re format my sd card as i know that will delete everything. I've tried plugging my phone into the computer to see if i could copy the photos into a file but my computer wont read my phone so i'm completely stuck and have no idea what to do. I've taken my sd card out and put it back in, but nothing has happened. Do you have any idea how i could solve this without losing my photos?

[perksie]

Have you tried using a card reader and plugging that into the pc.

You may then be able to get your pictures back using a utility like Recuva.

Regular back ups would help prevent this happening.

[MI5]

Are the photos on your SD card or on the phone? USB storage is not the same as SD storage. If photos are on removable sd card, take it out and reformat your phones storage from settings >storage menu.

[Anonymous]

You haven't linked the phone to a Dropbox (or similar) account have you? It might have been backing up your photos whenever you connect to Wifi as mine does?

[macblank]

Settings. ..

Storage.....

External sd......

UNMOUNT CARD

MOUNT CARD

that usually works... sometimes a lil knock can cause the sd card to move. Doing the above usually works.... OR

Just remove your card and then re insert it.

[Anonymous]

Hi,

Sorry to reply to an old post but I'm having the exact same problem, where it says my 'USB storage is damaged', and the 'SD card is being used as a mass storage device', and I can't see any of my pictures etc. Also the same issue where the phone won't connect to my computer.

HOWEVER unlike the original post I don't have an external SD card in the phone, so I don't really understand what's happened. The only answers I can find on the net relate to people who have a separate SD card so the solutions don't seem to apply to my situation.

Can anyone help? I really don't want to lose all my pictures, I do back them up regularly but have stuff from the last couple of months I don't have anywhere else 😞

Thanks,

Aimee

[MI5]

I'm guessing you might have a Galaxy S3?
USB storage in this case refers to the phones internal disc, which unfortunately, can fail, hence why we always recommend making backups.
All you can do is restart the phone and hope you can get it to connect to your PC to make a copy of your photos.

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I have a galazy S2 rather than S3, but I guess it must work in a similar way as you've suggested if I'm getting that message. I've tried restarting it a couple of times but no luck sadly. Thanks for your help anyway! Is it worth taking it to an o2 or phone repair shop to see if they can retrieve the pictures, or would they just reformat it as I'm probably going to have to?

[MI5]

It's a more common fault on the S3 but as the S2 is the same it can happen also.
If what you have on the phone is valuable to you it would be better to try a data recovery repair shop first as O2 or a general phone repair shop won't attempt to store or recover your data.

I can't remember all the options in the S2 recovery menu but on mine I have a "remount SD card option"

Boot into recovery mode (Vol Up+Home+Power) and see if you have a similar option.

[Anonymous]

Hi,

Thanks, I didn't know recovery mode existed! It has an option to 'apply update from SD card', but once  go into that it has a lot of other options and says 'choose a package to install'. Not sure if this is the right thing or not, I tried a couple of promising looking options (Pictures and DCIM) but they don't seem to have anything in them.

Other than 'apply update from SD card' it has options to 'reboot system', 'factory reset' and 'wipe cache partition', which sound like they won't do anything to recover the data.

Any other ideas would be really welcome, otherwise thanks for trying anyway.

Aimee