[myTouch 3G, Magic General] PutterPlace:
I purchased a new SanDisk 32GB microSDHC card for my Magic a few weeks ago. As of the beginning of this month, I started noticing some strange things happening like the card being set to read-only at random. I first noticed it from the camera app where it stated that I needed to insert an SD card before using it. I checked using Root Explorer, and strangely enough it was mounted as read-only. I mounted it back as R/W, and everything seemed fine...or so I thought.

A few days later, I was gonna send those pics that I took with the camera, but they were gone and nowhere to be found on my SD card. I got suspicious so I took a few test pics after (again) having to set the SD card with R/W permissions using Root Explorer. I checked the card, and the pics were there, but as soon as I tried to send them via MMS, the files disappeared. From here, I put the card in my PC's card reader and copied a random file to it. No issues with that, so I put the card back into my phone and that file was gone. Scratching my head some more, I put the card back into my PC and copied another random file. Then I refreshed the folder view within Explorer, and the file was not there. Seeing that I could read the files on the card, I feel that something strange was going on, so I made a backup to my PC. The files copied fine, and I can see the contents on my computer, so reading from the card isn't an issue. I, then, attempted to reformat it from the computer. Windows complained that it was unable to format the card, so I thought I'd go with something a little more refined when dealing with partitions. Using Paragon Partition Manager, I was unable to reformat without first deleting the partition already present, so I did just that. However, after deleting the partition, it gave an error saying that this drive cannot be formatted. Having gotten really frustrated with this issue, I decided to try out GParted on my laptop. I put the card in my card reader on that and ran GParted. It recognized the card, but showed that it was still partitioned...leaving me to believe that Partition Manager didn't actually delete the partition as it said it did. Didn't worry about that too much, and went ahead and deleted the partition through GParted and reformatted to FAT32 with no errors whatsoever during the process, and everything seemed to work fine. However, the used file space was exactly the same as it was before starting this process. I slapped the card back into my PC, and sure enough nothing has changed.

It now seems that the state of my card is somehow "frozen". I can read the files already existing on the card, but nothing can be written to it. The only thing that I did differently with this SD card, in comparison to any other card I've used, is using Swapper (org.azasoft.free.swapper) to create a swap file on my SD card that appeared to work fairly well until all this happened. Though maybe a 1GB swap file wasn't such a great idea, and most likely unnecessary anyways.

I've had a card die on me in the past, but just because it was old. Though, it was completely unusable...couldn't read or write from/to the card, respectively. So being able to read from the card is quite new to me, and I'm not sure if I've killed it, or if (possibly) there is a chance for revival. Normally, I wouldn't worry about it too much and just have the card replaced, but due to the highly sensitive data currently present on the card, that's completely out of the question at this point.

Any insight on this issue would be very highly appreciated. :)