Trouble Mounting microSD card [SOLVED]

[robertgrant1203]

So Ive been trying to load some music on my phones SD card and i cant seem to get the card to mount. Ive tried mounting it after a shut down and still nothing. any help would be appreciated.

[orschiro]

What did you do? Can you outline the steps? Any error messages you got?

[Mute Ant]

I assume you plug the card into a reader on your computer? There's 3 sorts of card and 3 sorts of reader, nine ways you can connect physically, but 3 of those 9 don't work.
An XC card won't work in a HC slot.
An XC card won't work in a SD slot.
An HC card won't work in a SD slot.
It doesn't help the unsuspecting novice that all three are physically compatible. The type of card will be marked on it. The type of slot might be marked, or you might have to look it up in the machine's manual, or get an external slot that definitely is compatible with your card.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compariso ... mory_cards

There's a similar situation with CD, DVD and BR disks...
A BR disk won't work in a DVD drive.
A BR disk won't work in a CD drive.
A DVD disk won't work in a CD drive.

[robertgrant1203]

i don't have any error messages. it just doesn't show up on the desk top or in the file manager, its an internal reader, i read somewhere that older computers need the card installed before it will load it. so i rebooted the computer and it still does not show up on the file manager or on the desktop.

[Petermint]

What size card? Small to medium cards are formatted to FAT. Larger cards are formatted to junkFAT. Sorry, the correct name is exFAT.
exFAT is proprietary to stop non Windows computers using it. Microsoft hope this will make Microsoft as obscenely profitable as Apple.

In most cases, you can format the card as FAT. Bill Gates will have to be satisfied with being only the second richest person on the planet.

[robertgrant1203]

its a miroSD card used in a phone, 32gb slipped into a larger housing to fit into the computer port. i do think it is fat formated

[orschiro]

Can you try any other distro from a live cd and check if the problem exists also on those?

[Petermint]

Resorting to the command line is a pain. I inserted a USB disk then unmounted it.

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lsblk -a

returned the following line for the unmounted disk. You can also use

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lshw

. See if lshw or lsblk -a shows the device for you.
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sdb 8:16 1 0 disk

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sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdb

returned the following data.

/dev/sdb:
SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]: f0 00 05 00 00 00 00 14 00 00 00 00 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

ATA device, with non-removable media
Standards:
Likely used: 1
Configuration:
Logical max current
cylinders 0 0
heads 0 0
sectors/track 0 0
--
Logical/Physical Sector size: 512 bytes
device size with M = 1024*1024: 0 MBytes
device size with M = 1000*1000: 0 MBytes
cache/buffer size = unknown
Capabilities:
IORDY not likely
Cannot perform double-word IO
R/W multiple sector transfer: not supported
DMA: not supported
PIO: pio0

[Mute Ant]

"32GB slipped into a larger housing" So it can't be a microSD card, they only go up to 4GB.

[bjmh46]

I believe that micro sd cards over 2gb are considered to be sdhc. My laptops, 5 thinkpads and 2 hp's, all read my 16, 32 & 64gb micro sd(hc) cards in the full size sd adapter. I would expect the OP's card is either exfat or has a problem. I've run into a few cards that were formatted exfat as purchased. One can easily install exfat-fuse from the repository, or use gparted to blow away the exfat partition and re-format fat 32.

Regards
Bob

[Petermint]

One of my 32 GB microSD cards in an adaptor as shown in

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lsblk -a

when mounted:
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
mmcblk0 179:0 0 29.1G 0 disk
└─mmcblk0p1 179:1 0 29.1G 0 part /media/peter/TOSHIBA32GB

The same 32 GB microSD card in an adaptor as shown in

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lsblk -a

when unmounted:
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
mmcblk0 179:0 0 29.1G 0 disk
└─mmcblk0p1 179:1 0 29.1G 0 part

When the microSD card is not mounted, the Disks application shows SD Card Reader /dev/mmcblk0 with partition W95 FAT32.

The following discussion covers installing exFAT code then using Gparted and Disks.
https://linuxforums.org.uk/index.php?topic=12121.0

[robertgrant1203]

Can you try any other distro from a live cd and check if the problem exists also on those?

it mounted fine in 17 before i upgraded to 18

[robertgrant1203]

"32GB slipped into a larger housing" So it can't be a microSD card, they only go up to 4GB.

yes it is a micro, and it has a full size adapter

[robertgrant1203]

SO i was thinking maybe it was a hardware driver issue, so i thought why don't i just install recent distro updates. I have them shut off. I had some issues awhile back with auto updates of previous distros so now i manually update. Anyway after this recent update, and a shutdown and fresh boot up, the card came up. I can even mount it without a restart. Sorry to waste all yalls time, i don't know why i didn't think of this before.

[bob466]

So Ive been trying to load some music on my phones SD card and i cant seem to get the card to mount. Ive tried mounting it after a shut down and still nothing. any help would be appreciated.

I'm glad I don't have your problem...I added a 32GB Sandisk microSDHC card to my phone...when I connected the phone to the computer I got..."cannot mount" so I clicked ok and about 6 seconds later the phone's HD opened double clicked the new microSDHC card which opened and I put my Music in...you can be lucky sometimes.

[Arrababiski]

"32GB slipped into a larger housing" So it can't be a microSD card, they only go up to 4GB.

yes it is a micro, and it has a full size adapter

Be careful with microSD to SD adapters, they fail sometimes. Please try:

- lsblk, then insert SD card, lsblk again and see if a new volume appears
- If a new volume appears, you can test it with e2fsck -v /dev/sdb1 (sdb1 or the new volume name that appears in your computer)
- Test the microSD card with another microSD to SD adapter in your computer
- Try to read the SD in another computer

After that we can see if the failure is in the adapter, in the card, in the computer or in the file system...

[BG405]

Be careful with microSD to SD adapters, they fail sometimes.

Indeed. I have trouble with one of mine, sometimes have to re-insert the card a couple of times before it works reliably.