[Q] SD card and internal storage not mounting after running CWMR. What to do?

[boohoo_sadface]

First off, I am very new to the world of ROMs/modding, so I apologize in advance if anything that follows misuses any terms or fails to provide proper information. Please let me know if you need me to clarify anything.

I have an Atrix 4G with AT&T running the stock 2.3.6 build 4.5.141. In light of Motorola's recent abandonment, I took it upon myself to load the stable version of CM7 onto my phone until enough of the bugs in CM10 had been worked out. I lurked XDA for a while until I got up the courage to root my phone and unlock my bootloader, at which I was successful (thanks, guys!), but I ran into a problem when I tried to use ClockworkMod Recovery to flash the ROM. After what seemed like a successful installation, I got caught in a boot loop, and had to boot to recovery mode.

Here's where I did the stupid thing: while in recovery mode, I tried several different options that I did not fully understand and somehow ended up getting it to boot back to the stock OS restored to what appear to be more or less factory settings. That's good, right? Well, now neither my phone's internal storage nor the external SD card will show up in my phone. I guess they aren't mounting? In Settings>Storage, the option to mount the SD card is grayed out and the internal storage listing is nowhere to be seen. Obviously this keeps me from accessing my recovery data, if it's even still there. My wifi also seems to not be working, displaying "error" whenever I try to turn it on in Settings.

The weird thing is that my phone's OS seems to be working fine otherwise. I can't access any file storage, but I can install apps to the app storage partition and use them just fine, as long as they don't require internal or SD storage. I am honestly confounded and I cannot find anything that resembles a solution to this problem. I am done messing with things I don't understand, so I am asking for help.

Help?

 

[ravilov]

No idea what you did, but I'd say you somehow managed to bork both your storages. The easiest way to fix this is to go to CWM and format both internal and external storages. The downsize to this is obviously that you will definitely lose everything stored there. A more complicated approach would be to connect the phone to the computer and run some filesystem scanning/fixing/repairing tools and hope for the best. As for the external SD card, it would be even better if you could pull it out and put it into a card reader and connect it to the computer that way.

 

[boohoo_sadface]

No idea what you did, but I'd say you somehow managed to bork both your storages. The easiest way to fix this is to go to CWM and format both internal and external storages. The downsize to this is obviously that you will definitely lose everything stored there. A more complicated approach would be to connect the phone to the computer and run some filesystem scanning/fixing/repairing tools and hope for the best. As for the external SD card, it would be even better if you could pull it out and put it into a card reader and connect it to the computer that way.

Thank you for your reply.

I followed your advice and attempted to format /sdcard and /emmc (I believe that's internal storage) in recovery mode. I got a mount error when I tried the /sdcard, but /emmc format appeared to be successful. I then rebooted the phone, but the conditions are still the same. No internal or external SD storage. I will try to get a card reader for the micro SD card to look at it on my computer, but I am alarmed that I can't get access to my internal storage even after formatting it.

What kind of filesystem tools would I need to use while plugged into a computer? What could I do if the storages aren't mounting? Am I completely screwed?

 

[NIMBAH]

Not sure about your phone but on my galaxy s, emmc is the external storage and sdcard is the internal.

Sent from my GT-I9000 using xda premium

 

[boohoo_sadface]

Not sure about your phone but on my galaxy s, emmc is the external storage and sdcard is the internal.

Sent from my GT-I9000 using xda premium

Oh dear. That would mean that what I can't mount is actually the internal storage. Is there any way to remedy that?

 

[ravilov]

Connect the phone to the computer (enable USB transfer mode on the phone if needed) and run some windows built-in tools like scandisk, chkdsk, format...
Just one caveat - if you decide to format, make sure you select FAT32, NOT exFAT, NTFS...

 

[boohoo_sadface]

Connect the phone to the computer (enable USB transfer mode on the phone if needed) and run some windows built-in tools like scandisk, chkdsk, format...
Just one caveat - if you decide to format, make sure you select FAT32, NOT exFAT, NTFS...

Alright, I tried to connect like you said, making sure to enable USB mass storage mode. However, while the PC acknowledges that something is plugged in (installs drivers), neither storage is showing up as a drive when I try to access them with Windows Explorer. I can't do anything to them if they don't show up, or can I?

I did order a microSD card reader to try to connect the external drive to the computer that way. It should arrive sometime tomorrow. I'm thinking that if I can get the computer to read it that way that maybe I can format it so that the phone will finally be able to mount it again. Not sure what to do about the internal storage (or the broken wifi) after that, but I suspect that if I manage to flash a different ROM from external storage that I'll be able to recover that functionality? Or am I mistaken?

 

[ravilov]

Hard to say. You sure have it tough there.
Try this - when the phone is connected and transfer mode selected, right click My Computer, select Manage, then go to Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management and see if anything appears there. If not... then I'm out of ideas I'm afraid.

 

[boohoo_sadface]

Hard to say. You sure have it tough there.
Try this - when the phone is connected and transfer mode selected, right click My Computer, select Manage, then go to Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management and see if anything appears there. If not... then I'm out of ideas I'm afraid.

I did what you said, and this was the result:

I'm not sure if that counts as nothing or not.

 

[jorno88]

I did what you said, and this was the result:

I'm not sure if that counts as nothing or not.

could you do a chkdsk of the drives?
open start, type cmd, right click and open as admin,
then type chkdsk L: (I think, resolution of screenshot is not that good)
then chkdsk F:
see if any errors pop up

 

[boohoo_sadface]

could you do a chkdsk of the drives?
open start, type cmd, right click and open as admin,
then type chkdsk L: (I think, resolution of screenshot is not that good)
then chkdsk F:
see if any errors pop up

It's E, not L. Sorry about the resolution.

For both chkdsk commands, the message "Cannot open volume for direct access" was returned.

 

[ravilov]

OK well, at least something. It's a little worrisome that it says "no media" even for internal storage.
Not sure if you had the external SD card inserted at that point, if you did, try the same thing but take the SD card out of the phone.
Also try right-clicking on one or the other, see what it offers - if you get something like "create volume" or similar, might try that.

 

[jorno88]

Is it correct that one of the drives shown has about 1.46 GB (i assume your microsd) and the other has 14.37 GB?
that would seem strange to me because my internal accessible memory is only 10.71 GB, seems like system partition or something is considered with it. Maybe you have a problem with your partition table...

 

[boohoo_sadface]

Is it correct that one of the drives shown has about 1.46 GB (i assume your microsd) and the other has 14.37 GB?
that would seem strange to me because my internal accessible memory is only 10.71 GB, seems like system partition or something is considered with it. Maybe you have a problem with your partition table...

Those are actually partitions of the PC's hard disk (C).

My internal storage should be ~8GB and the external one is a 32GB microSD card. Those would be the E and F removable drives that show up as having no media attached.

 

[boohoo_sadface]

OK well, at least something. It's a little worrisome that it says "no media" even for internal storage.
Not sure if you had the external SD card inserted at that point, if you did, try the same thing but take the SD card out of the phone.
Also try right-clicking on one or the other, see what it offers - if you get something like "create volume" or similar, might try that.

I tried again with microSD removed, and the results were exactly the same, even down to both E & F volumes both being displayed in Disk Management when the phone is connected. Chkdsk commands in the command prompt for both of these volumes also returned the exact same error message as before.

 

[ravilov]

I tried again with microSD removed, and the results were exactly the same, even down to both E & F volumes both being displayed in Disk Management when the phone is connected. Chkdsk commands in the command prompt for both of these volumes also returned the exact same error message as before.

I see.
Any potentially useful options on right-click on either?
Also try booting into fastboot and do moto-fastboot erase emmc and see what happens. (Hope you have moto-fastboot installed and ready.)

 

[jorno88]

the error message for chkdsk seems to be related to another program installed on your pc, check here if it is one of these programs. If all this doesn't work (or you're tired of fiddling and trying to get back your data) you can try formatting them through cmd (FORMAT E: /FS:FAT32 and FORMAT F: /FS:FAT32)
if it all works you can use a program called recuva to try get some data back afterwards.

 

[boohoo_sadface]

I see.
Any potentially useful options on right-click on either?
Also try booting into fastboot and do moto-fastboot erase emmc and see what happens. (Hope you have moto-fastboot installed and ready.)

Here is the result:

 

[boohoo_sadface]

the error message for chkdsk seems to be related to another program installed on your pc, check here if it is one of these programs. If all this doesn't work (or you're tired of fiddling and trying to get back your data) you can try formatting them through cmd (FORMAT E: /FS:FAT32 and FORMAT F: /FS:FAT32)
if it all works you can use a program called recuva to try get some data back afterwards.

I tried the format command, and here was the result:

 

[jorno88]

So same result as before, did you look in the list of those programs? Else you can try to go into safemode with your pc and do the chkdsk or/and format command from in there.
Might be easier than uninstalling programs