vB Easy Archive - 3125 Storage Card Problems SOLUTION?

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3125 Storage Card Problems SOLUTION?
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Posted by: jayiw

Hi,

After the storage card problem becoming worse and worse where it's not recognizing the card, as a last ditch effort before returning the phone for an exchange I tried a little experiment and it seemed to work so far (although not enough time to see if it lasts).

On a reboot, the card always comes back, but after in my pouch absorbing shock it seems to suddenly stop so I 'simulated' the shock by tapping on the back, shaking the phone, and opening/closing the flip a couple of times. Nothing real harsh, just about 30 seconds of light shock. Well, this proved to do just that. The card did not recognize there after.

So I opened the back, removed the battery, removed the smartchip, and popped up the smartcard holder for an examination. The first thing I noticed is that the card seemed to not be very tight against the metal connectors. I could understand how a slight movement or some shock to the phone could easily move the card, hence losing the card recognition. What I then did was remove the card and squeeze the two clips on the side of the card holder with my fingers, and I did it LIGHTLY. I reinserted the card and noticed when pushing the holder down it now 'snapped' into the holes where the clips met. Before it was kind of just sitting in there. Now I do not remember if it used to snap in there when I first installed the card. If it did, then obviously it bends over a short amount of time and loosens which means the holder it faulty. But anyway, after putting everything back together I repeated the same kind of 'shock' test and it was fine. I did it over and over and it never faulted of recognizing the card (yet!).

Only time will tell if this is a temporary fix or not. If it loosens again it's obvious that the holder is faulty on some or all units. Maybe they'll come out with a stronger card holder on newer units?

If anyone wants to try to do the squeeze trick PLEASE BE CAREFUL as it's so delicate.

Jay

Posted by: elushon

Yeah I personally would just go ahead and swap that puppy out. When you have to bend things to get them to work consistantly, to me it just seems that the phone needs to be replaced. I don't like quick fixes in my electronic devices.

Posted by: jrbman

My husband & I both bought 3125's and we both had our Sandisk microSD cards disappear randomly on us daily. They'd work fine in all apps (music player, photos, our Swedish-English dictionary app stored on the card) and then randomly & suddenly , no app would recognize the card. Often a reboot would fix it temporarily, but sometimes it wouldn't. We were tearing our hair out.

Fortunately I saw a post on the Cingular forums that solved the problem for us easily. See http://forums.cingular.com/cng/boar...scending&page=2 posting by DaltonAmes about putting a piece of paper over the button in the battery compartment. It sounds a little crazy, but it's been days and neither of us has had a reboot now (we'd be normally go maybe 8 hours max before) and DaltonAmes later posted to say it worked for him over a month. Also it fixed his problem with random reboots. Here's his posted solution:

I was having the same symptoms as everyone else: The micro SD card would dissappear all the time.. sometimes in the middle of a song. At the same time, I was also having a problem where my 3125 kept rebooting randomly every time I would sit it down on a table or put it in my pocket. It appears that these are both related. I read on a forum somewhere that the reboot problem had to do with the sensor switch that senses if the battery cover has been removed. This switch is located on the bottom right when you take the battery cover off. I took a tiny folded piece of paper and stuck it over the switch to create a tighter seal between the switch and the cover. This appears to have worked! Since I did this, I haven't had any problems with the micro sd card disappearing, and I haven't had any random reboots. Of course, it has only been a couple days, so I'm keeping an eye out for any other abnormalities.