FP2 Android 9: SD-Card not recognized

Help Fairphone 2
1

Hello Forum,

the sd-card of my FP2 stopped working, was not recognized by Android 9, only internal storage is listed in device settings. So I’ve bought a new sd-card (32 GB, ScanDisk), but it wasn’t detected also by Android. It can be accessed on my Mac using adapter. I’ve formatted it there as FAT32 and exFAT, but that didn’t help :frowning:

Do you have any further tipps or hints for me?

Many thanks in advance

2

If the FP2 shows no sign at all when you put in the SD card (old or new one) then it could be a problem with the SD card slot…
If the phone does not recognize the SD card (because of a problem e.g. with used format) it should at least propose to reformat the card…

2 Likes
3

Hello Volker,

yes it seems so, that the SD card connector or any other FP2 part, which is working with SD card functionality, is broken. But I wonder, why this happened. I handle my FP2 with care, neither shocks nor falls happened.

Short description of my yesterday’s checks:

  • 3 sd cards: 2x new 32GB Sandisk, 1x old 32GB Samsung
  • my wife’s retired FP2 was able to detect and setup 1x Sandisk and 1x Samsung, but it became really warm/hot beside of the camera, setup both as external storage
  • connected these 2 sd cards to my Mac, there disk utility shows a new, unknown format, no more FAT32
  • connected these 2 sd cards to my FP2, both haven’t been detected there

I’ll retire my FP2, too, I will keep it for emergency cases, if no more checks can be done, or repair hints are available

  • short akku runtime
  • slow
  • poor camera quality
  • 2x new microphone module

My wife retired her FP2 in 2021 also because of bad quality:

  • Permanent, sporadic restarts while usage, very annoying
  • slow
  • 3x new microphone modules
  • short akku runtime, standby fewer than 24 hours

I lost my sympathy for FP.

Have a nice day.

4

I can understand the frustration with the problems described. And I don’t have good advice for repairing the SD card slot.
Still you might keep in mind that not all users are that affected that much by those problems (so I’m still using my 6y old FP2) and that the FP2 was the first modular device overall, so there was not much experience with possible design flaws. I think FP has learned from that and the following models seem to be much more sturdy (and they seem to be improved in all topics you’ve mentioned - except that for some the camera quality still seems not to be good enough - so this is obviously a very difficult area for improvement).

Have a nice day, too.

2 Likes
5

No problem, Volker. It felt strange, that the microphone module of both FP2s gave up their ghost at the same time, both in march 2021! My wife’s retired FP2 is from 2016, my 2019.

We’ve paid approx. 500,- € for each, that’s a lot of money to us, main reason was the idealistic ecology idea behind that FP2 - but minimum was not realized: Quality and stability.

So, best wishes to all of you!

6

This topic was automatically closed 180 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.