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Back up the contents of the SD card befor formatting!
All data on the SD card will be lost and can not be recovered.
If your phone is acting strange it could be because it can not read the SD card properly. Back up the contents of the SD card and format the card while it is in the phone. See the Troubleshooting page for more info.
How to Format the SD Card
From one of the home screens:
- Menu
- Settings
- Sd card & Storage
- Unmount SD card
- Format SD card
Directory (folder) structure
The result immediately after formatting the SD card in the phone is this directory structure:
As you can see not much is created with the basic format of the card.
Different Card Sizes - Different File System
I have formatted three different size SD cards in my phone. here are the results:
2 GB - Fat16 8 GB - Fat32 16 GB - Fat32
Experimenting with the file system
I formatted a 2GB SD card to different file systems, here are the results:
- ext2 - phone reported that the SD card is blank or using an unsupported file system.
- ext3 - phone reported that the SD card is blank or using an unsupported file system.
- fat16 - this is the file system that the phone formatted a 2 GB card with
- fat32 - phone recognized the card and created the directory structure posted above on it.The phone formats larger size SD cards with this file system.
- ntfs - phone reported that the SD card is blank or using an unsupported file system.
So this is a surprise - a linux based OS only recognizes file systems primarily used by Microsoft.