✏ Damaged sd card try reformatting - DON'T REFORMAT until you've read this!

Woke up, turned on my fairphone and started using it as usual. Screen freezes and eventually after about a minute reboots and says ‘Damaged SD card try reformatting it’. Most my apps and all my photos and files gone. Great start to the day!

After trying a couple of reboots and removing the battery, no change and I started wondering just when I last made a backup of all those pictures of my 10 month old son :-s The answer, as you can probably guess, yes far too long ago :frowning:

On the way to work, I decided to Google to see if anyone had had the same issue with their fairphone and more importantly whether there was any way to recover data. I must admit that I wasn’t holding out much hope. But I did come across this forum post: SD-card problem after 1.6 Cherry update, where @gimpan had a similar problem. He managed to recover his data and get back the missing apps simply by changing language on the phone and rebooting. Sounded crazy and having worked with computers for many years I didn’t hold out much hope as it just sounded so silly. But what the heck, let’s give it a go I thought. So I changed the language to Swedish and rebooted - OMG it worked, THANK YOU @gimpan, you’ve just saved several documented months of my son’s life.

I’m posting this as a new topic so that anyone else that this happens to doesn’t just give up and lose all their data. Please try changing the language and rebooting!

Message to Fairphone, I love your company and ideas and to a degree your phone, but please please please make your OS stable! I’ve had several of my friends ask if I’d recommend them getting a fairphone and because I’ve had so much trouble (and they’re used to well functioning iPhones), I’ve just had to say NO, not yet at least (since I wanted to keep them as friends).

For the record, I’m running the recalled 1.8 Kola Nut OS (without the change to the memory partition) and I don’t have a removable SD card inserted.

I’m waiting for the update that FP has been promising since December.

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Thank you for sharing your experience! I’m gonna wiki this post so everyone can contribute by clicking the green pencil above.

Remember to make backups frequently!

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