Windows Mobile Tip 1: The Storage Card2 problem

by jaganath, posted in Microsoft, Smartphone, Windows Mobile

One fine morning you wake up and find that your pocket IE is not working. Cursing Microsoft, you launch Newsbreak to check your latest news articles and get annoyed that this application too is not working. Worse, even your pocket Outlook has gone for a toss. You start blaming Bill Gates now.

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Well, the problem really is because of all the tweaks that you made on the Windows Mobile OS. In order to free up the Program memory and storage, most geeky users edit the registry to store data in the Storage Card – the IE cache, rss cache, outlook mails, PIM data etc., You edit the registry and change storage locations to something like "Storage Card\IECache" and the like. Well, there is nothing wrong in it and it is a good idea indeed. Unfortunately, if there is some error in the Storage Card, your Pocket PC or Smartphone may not be able to locate this folder, and so it automatically creates a folder by name "Storage Card" in the memory! When your SD card is inserted back or restored, your phone or pda gives it the name Storage Card2, since there is a folder already by name Storage Card.

Solutions:

If this happens, all the shortcuts/launchers for applications that are installed in the Storage card will stop working, though you can still launch them by going to the respective folder in Storage Card2. You cannot delete "Storage card" folder because some applications may be using files from here. The solution? Rename the folder! Once you rename, immediately do a soft reset. Once the OS boots again, quickly locate this renamed folder and delete it. Now you can insert your SD/CF card back and you will see it being properly named as Storage Card. Peace.

 

PS: This is my first article in a series of tips and tricks that I am going to publish for Windows Mobile users.

60 thoughts on “Windows Mobile Tip 1: The Storage Card2 problem”

  2. Kudos from me as well. I just installed a program that insisted on writing a log file to my storage card, but apparently the storage card wasn’t initialized properly at the time when it started logging. Next thing I know my Storage Card is “Storage Card2” and I had to jump through hoops to kill that Registry setting or change log file locations. I appreciate this information.

    -Peter

    Reply

  4. Is there anyway from having to repeat this operation multiple times? I have a HP HW6925 (even occurred with the HTC 8125) and I will have to repeat this process at least once a week. Although a quick fix, the repeativeness of it is annoying. Is there a permanate fix for this, an OS fix, upgrade download… or any hint of a fix of this problem from MS? Thanks.

    Reply

  5. @Bryan
    If the problem is occurring so often, I think it may be with your memory card. Use another mem card and see if the problem persists.

    This is a very rare phenomenon. For me it has happened twice in my 5 years usage of Windows Mobile ! (4 devices in total)

    Reply

  6. Hi there:

    Thanks for the tip, it works for the most part…I have my atachement back on the actual stroage card, but I cannot delete the renamed “storage card” file. WM5 error states that it is a system file..etc.

    I am using a unlocked unbranded HTC-s620.

    Please let me know if there is something i need to do to fix this.

    Thanks.

    Reply

  7. Thanks for the advice.

    Question:
    This corrected my problem and my attachments & emails are being stored on my storage card. However, when I click on the attachments, I get an “Unable to display the attachment.” error. Can you help?

    Comment:
    In case anyone has this issue, everytime I soft booted my PPC 6700, it kept renaming the card back to storage card2. Someone suggested on another website to remove “messaging” from the “today” window. That did the trick.

    Thanks in advance for your help.

    Reply

  9. I needed to remove my device from sync, then do a soft reset before I was allowed to rename the file (problems with a sharing violation), but then it worked as advertised. Thanks.

    Reply

  10. The storage card drivers are loaded at a lower priority than the Today screen and/or the Inbox/Activesync, so when the system boots and the process starts, the folder “storage card” is unavailable to the OS and process, so the OS creates one for the process to use.

    Reply

  11. The ultimate solution would be for the storage card drivers to load before anything else starts, which I am researching now, but as yet I haven’t found that answer.

    Reply

  13. THX U SSSSSSSSOOOOOOOO MUCH! U r great! Ive been trying to figure out how to fix it for the longest time

    Reply

  14. Dude u rock.

    One other thing. Im now using windows vista which comes with windows mobile device center. Does anyone know how to get the emails attachments in outlook stored in the storage card instead of the main storage when syncing?

    Reply

  16. Man,

    1. I got this problem
    2. Googled. “Windows Mobile + Storage Card 2”
    3. First hit is yours. went in that.
    4. problem solved….

    I wish all problems in my life to solve like this..
    Thanks a lot.
    —
    Mkrishnan.

    Reply

  17. Dude, kudos!

    I’m from Brazil, living and born. You addressed so simply an annoying issue! Thanks a lot, my stupid Treo 700WX was giving me a message of “low storage capacity” or something. And I realized NOW with your help that everything was going to the internal memory under an internal folder named “Storage Card”. And my crappy Kingston was named “Storage Card2” – bummer. Thanks a LOT! Hugs from Brazil!

    Reply

  19. Great tip – I just got this nice 2 GB card and was shocked to see that everything stopped working. A quick Google turned up this tip – excellent work. Cheers

    Reply

  20. Hello,

    A slight variation on the fix for me:

    I am using an AT&T Tilt (aka HTC TyTN II) with a 2GB MicroSD card that was coming up as “StorageCard2“, and had to create a “\Mail\AttachPath” directory on it first before deleting the “StorageCard” directory.

    Regards,

    Aryeh Goretsky

    Reply

  21. You dudes rock!! I just had this problem and squashed it in minutes thanks you this blog! WOOT!

    thank you all!!!!!

    Reply

  22. Its even easier than explained above. With the Pocket PC booted, delete the Storage Card folder. The Storage Card2 folder will still remain. Remove the physical memory card until Storage Card2 folder vanishes from File Explorer. Now place the memory card back in. It will now reappear as Storage Card. No need to reboot.

    Reply

  23. Man, I THANK you. Suddenly, and without even a reboot, my Samsung SGHi780 had created a folder “Storage Card” and renamed its actual Storage Card to Storage Card 2. Just about nothing worked anymore. Delete the folder, soft reset, say cheese.

    Reply

  25. I just upgrade from windows mobile 5 to 6. After a successful upgrade, I re-inserted my storage card into my blackjack. Now now of my files are recognized on the storage card, in fact they are renamed. .jpg are now xxxx.jpg.2dde555 same for mp3 and movie files. Renaming the file doesnt work, and when I transfer them back onto my laptop, I can’t open the file there either. Please don’t tell me I lost all the data on my storage card 😦 help please!

    Reply

  29. Hi, i had the same problem and i solved it doing the same, but the las time it happens i couldnt manage to rename or delete the storage card folder not even from activesync, it says “error renaming file
    cannot rename “storage card”: acces is denied be certain that the file is not write protected and is not currently using”
    if someone knows how to solve this i would be very thankfull. help me please!!

    Reply

  30. what rename??? where how…how does one rename ?
    ok I command it “renamed”!!!!

    ummm…”open seseme?”
    “presto”?????
    wtf?

    rename where ?
    how?
    if your going to suggest something then explain it for the layman!

    Reply

  35. Thank you for posting this! Slight modification for my T-Mobile Wing:
    1) Uncheck “Messaging” in Today Screen items
    2) Rename newly created “Storage Card” to something like “Storage Card3”
    3) Put in new storage card (it will show up as “Storage Card”
    4) Soft re-set (so you can then delete “Storage Card3”
    5) Delete “Storage Card3”

    Reply

  38. Hey Brian from January 18, 2007. I think I may have discovered why this keeys happening. With my HTC “Slide” (P.O.S.!), I had to set the wireless manager to “Flight Mode” because my Outlook is set to synchronize immediately with incomming mail. If this happens when the card is out, the folder “Storage Card” is created. This is what happened to me originally to cause the problem in the first place. When attempting the fix, the new “Storage Card” folder kept popping up. Now, I set the phone to flight mode before removing the stinking card. Sheesh!

    Reply

  40. Thats all ?

    I’m working in mobility and we encounter this problem with 20% of our 4000 PDA for a customer (Motorola MC55 Win mobile 6.1 – MicroSD 2Go) when we are mastering it (all the materials are new – never used !)

    My questions are :

    – why did this bug appear ?
    – how to prevent this bug ?
    – is this Windows bug ? storage card bug ? constructor bug ?

    There is a lot of response to resolve the bug, but nobody search about the causes…

    Any idea ?

    Thanks in advance.

    Reply

  41. Thank you so much you just saved my sister’s life!!! Ya my sister… coz her winmo got this prob and she was back of me to get it solved…

    Thanks again.

    Reply

  42. Thank you very much for the solution…Just to note…I had the problem just after resetting after installing and running SmartTweaker. I tried to undo the changes made as per SmartTweaker’s Help but nothing changed…until I found this solution…It was a great help…How can I find the rest of your tips?

    Reply

  43. thanks from my heart….. thanks, thanks,thanks,thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks,
    i hv no words realy……. thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks,

    Reply

  46. I know it sounds stupid but I think it is not that easy to do that. Either using ActiveSync and the embedded file browser, even after 1000s resets, you cannot rename the folder.

    did not manage to solve the problem, as other users here but thanks for sharing

    Reply

  49. top man, this worked after I deleted the folder named “storage card” (as this seemed to have some email attachments (legacy of activesync)), soft reset my palm treo 750v (win mob 6 prof) and then was able to rename “storage card2” back to “storage card”.
    great advice. much appreciated, saved me doing a hard reset again and reloading the apps.

    Reply

  50. First I would like to say bugs like this are why Microsoft sucks. They didn’t have the foresight, scratch that.. – common sense to know that obviously people would want to store their complete emails on the storage card in WM devices, especially given the feeble amount of memory that came on phones until recently limiting the amount of email you could store to a practically useless minimum. Not only that, this bug has been the cause of tens of thousands of hours wasted collectively by Mircosoft customers, and how many years has this bug been around now ? 6 or 7 or longer ? And Microsoft still doesn’t care about you enough to fix this problem, which would take one of their software programmers probably less than an hour to correct. They just keep selling their half baked product and raking in the bucks and this is why Microsoft will ultimately lose their dominance. It’s a shame because this stock email program is actually a decent program that’s done 90% right. Unfortunately, it’s the glaring 10% which they refuse to fix that makes the program almost useless.

    I now have and HD2 with WM 6.5 and this problem still exists ! I believe the actual roost cause of the problem is described by Jim in post #10. On my previous 2 phones, a T-mobile MDA and a T-Mobile Wing, the recurrence of the storage card2 was solved by removing the email notification from the Today screen.

    There is no Today screen visible on a stock HD2 but it may exist and is just being masked by the HTC Sense. However, there is a mail screen in Sense that may be causing the same problem.

    There are many posts out there that say you can put your mail and mail attachments on the storage card by modifying your registry:

    The correct registry entries for a WM6.5 device are:

    * For EMAIL bodies : HKLM\System\Inbox\Settings\PropertyPath – create the PropertyPath value, if necessary, and input the path you want to use (i.e., \Storage Card\Mail)(REG_SZ string)

    * For Email attachments: HKLM\System\Inbox\Settings\AttachPath – create the AttachPath value, if necessary, and input the path you want to use for attachments (i.e., \Storage Card\Mail\Attachments) (REG_SZ string)

    However, they all fail to point out two things:

    1. You don’t need to modify your registry to put attachments on the storage card. You simply need to start the “Messaging” program, go to Menu, Options, Storage (tab) and check the box that says “When available use the storage card to store attachments”. Soft reset. You’re attachments will now absolutely be stored on the storage card in a folder the program will create called Inbox.mstXXXXXXXXX.xxxxx with some numerical appendage.

    You can make the above registry change to move the email body to the storage card, soft reset, then use the mail program and all of your email bodies will indeed go in to the folder you created. Until you actually download an email, you can reboot as many times as you like and no storage card2 will be created, but as soon as you download an email, a storage card2 folder will be created.

    You can usually just delete the newly created storage card folder without removing the sd card, and reboot at least twice and the storage card2 folder will automatically be renamed back to storage card and it will stay this way until you download another email. Then the storage card2 problem starts all over again.

    I ultimately wound up putting the email bodies back into main memory and use the storage card for attachments. With the much larger amount of memory in the HD2 than older phones, I can store a more reasonable amount of email, however it does tend to slow the phone down when you store 1000 emails and it annoys the heck out of me that I can’t actually move all of this to the SD card.

    If anyone actually comes up with a solution to the actual root of the problem, please let me know ! The solution may just be finding a way to get the SD card driver to load before anything else.

    Reply

  52. Wow, thank you notes from November 29, 2006 to May 16, 2011 (and now mine), talk about a recurring problem!
    My SDCard dissapears from time to time, and until now I kept removing/reinserting amd soft-reseting until it is recognized again as “Storage Card”.
    Thank you!

    Now, if I could get my calendar notifications back …

    Reply

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  56. Just purchased 12 Motorola MC65 Handheld Scanners, with Mobile 5. These scanners are also creating another drive called Storage Card2. It is happening daily to all of the scanners, Microsoft needs an update for this bug since it’s happened since 2006. Let me know if anyone knows of an update/patch to fix.

    Reply

  57. Oh my goodness! Impressive article dude! Many thanks, However I
    am going through troubles with your RSS. I don’t know why I am unable to join it.
    Is there anyone else getting similar RSS problems? Anyone who knows the solution
    can you kindly respond? Thanx!!

    Reply

  58. It is the best time to make some plans for the future and it’s time to be happy.

    I have read this post and if I could I desire to suggest you some interesting things or tips.
    Maybe you could write next articles referring to this article.
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  59. Hello,

    At the company I work, we have several Motorola ES400 devices (Windows Mobile 6.5.3 Professional). All those devices have SD storage cards installed. From time to time somehow Storage card is renamed to a “Storage Card 2”. I know how to temporarily solve this issue, by removing the SD card, renaming/deleting the “Storage Card” folder and inserting the SD card again, which was discussed in many internet forums. However I am searching for permanently solving this one or at least to find the reasons what may be causing the issue.

    Thanks in advance.

    Reply

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