My Droid - Installing a new microSD card

An upgrade of sorts

So, I got up this morning and thought; I have a 16GB microSD card in my defunct Windows Mobile 6.5 HTC Touch Diamond 2 phone which I took out of service at the end of September 2011.

My Droid which is an HTC Sensation came with an 8GB microSD card, not that I have used half that storage yet, but the idea that I could double the space was appealing enough.

First, I did a search for the easiest way to transfer all the data and applications from the current microSD card to the bigger microSD card and everything that came up in my search was some convoluted and complicated method of copying the data, I needed to think of a better way.

Preparations

So first, I got the card out of my Windows mobile phone and remembered I had a microSD adapter I had acquired years ago in one of my cupboards. Inserting the microSD card in the adapter I inserted it into the slot on my netbook and copied all the data to a folder on my netbook.

Then I formatted the microSD card to FAT-32 file system and it was ready for usage. As I was doing this, it occurred to me that I could mount the SD card in my Droid as a drive through the USB connection to my netbook.

I mounted the microSD card storage on my Droid, unsure of the best way to copy the data and retain all the security and format of data with the applications on the SD card I decided to use the Robocopy command.

The first copy

Robocopy which comes with the most recent copies of Microsoft Windows is a robust file copy utility that is quite versatile for copy and backup routines.

I used the mirror option which should be used with caution because it wipes the target drive or target folder before copying data. I needed to be sure I noted the source and target drives.

Using Robocopy < Source Drive > < Target Drive >  /MIR

Once the files were copied, I replaced the microSD card and restarted my Droid; two errors were displayed, one to do with MSN Messenger and the Economist Apps both of which I had to forcibly close. I could not find them anywhere on my phone so I started up the file manager and found the .android_secure folder was unreadable however with the Astro file manager app I could read the folder.

Using the Android Assistant app, I checked to see if there were any apps on my SD card using the Tools | App 2 SD widget and that revealed there were no apps on my microSD card when I was expecting at least 15 or so apps.

It became evident that the .android_secure folder contained all the apps that I had moved to the SD card and there were no clear solutions to resolve this somewhat annoying quirk much as I did not want to accept the fact that changing microSD cards needed some rocket science tool.

The better copy

So putting my original microSD card in the adapter I loaded it on my netbook then mounted the SD card on my Droid, once again making a good note of the source drive which was now on the adapter I selected all the folders and copied them to the target drive which was now on my Droid overwriting everything. This being a standard Windows copy and paste procedure.

After the copy was completed, I restarted my Droid and all my apps were restored, especially those on the microSD card with no errors.

Now, I have over 10GB of space free on my Droid, looks like there is much more I can put on my Droid, my complete classical music collect and even the complete audio bible that adds up to just over 1 GB.