Phone reports SD card was encrypted by another device - but it wasn't

[appyface]

FoxKat I just read your testing reply now (my earlier post beat yours in so I didn't yet know about yours)...

Ugly, isn't it...

To use my house analogy earlier, this is like locking the house and pocketing the key, only sometime while away the locksmith came...! What causes the locksmith to come and change the locks? On all the doors? Just some of them? aarrrggghhhh

Here's something worse still (to me) about using the encryption. As discussed, I believe MotoUSB/MotoCast doesn't do any encryption/decryption, the cards are mounted as-is to the PC just like they were removed and inserted into a card reader slot. So all the files I copy TO my phone via USB cable are NOT ENCRYPTED. Great. My wonderfully-protected-from-data-theft-by-encryption phone is stolen and the theives get everything I've copied to the card.

And another thing, you can't even decrypt by emailing yourself the file. Just now I created a quick movie and took a photo, double-checked that that phone could read them, then sent them to myself as attachments via email straight from my phone. I opened my email from my PC and saved the attachments to disk. They appear to be encrypted still. They're certainly not readable (and my PC understands JPG's and MP4's just fine).

It appears the encryption aspect is not only unstable but easily affected by some as yet unknown factors.

But I really do not want to turn off encryption, since anyone could simply remove the SD cards and take my data. From now on when I copy files to my SD card I'll just have to play some games to get them encrypted if they're sensitive, and keep unencrypted copies as my backups. The files created by my phone I guess I'm just stuck with playing the unencrypt game...

 

[appyface]

I am curious (...)

In general my experience so far is:

1. On a working phone, if the file on the SD card is NOT encrypted (however it got that way) then yes the PC can read the file when the card is mounted via MotoUSB/MotoCast or into a card reader slot. There are several permutations I've not tried that could render this statement incorrect, though. Some of them are in FoxKat's testing post, above.

2. The MotoUSB/Motocast software doesn't do anything differently than if you pull the card and put it into a card reader slot, as far as I can tell. The phone's OS isn't involved in any of this, so it's just binary file copying as far as I can tell. If the file is encrypted it stays that way, if it isn't it stays that way.

3. What seems to change is what the phone's OS wants to use to decrypt the files. "Something" happens and the phone can't read the files it was able to read minutes before.

 

[Cheesehead81]

My original Razr Maxx got stuck in a boot loop after updating. It was "unfixable" and returned to Verizon because I had it password protected. Now, the SD card I had in it won't work in my new (refurb) phone they sent me. I get the following message: "sd card has been secured by another device and cannot be accessed unless formatted". the only option given is "OK". Can I recover my files??

 

[The Stig 04]

That makes sense i guess. Goes with the whole R2Ds's these arent the droids your looking for gig we have been seeing. I cant wait for the Droid/Sholes. Going to be leaving Sprint and my PRe for it

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 2

 

[The Stig 04]

Alrighty then! Tapatalk seems to be wigging out and when I went to quote the person above me to reply it posted a quote I have never seen and I don't know how to delete it.....fantastic :thumbdown:

Anyways to the post above my first post asking if he could recover the files......not to be rude or anything but did you read anything at all on this thread???

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 2

 

[NWRULES]

Something similar happened to me the other day also...... Message popped up saying "blank sd card". Totally out of the blue, the sd card just went blank. Phone won't read it. Tried sd card into computer too. Empty. Not sure if something in the phone erased it or what. Totally baffled and bummed out. 3 years of pics and hundreds of music songs gone. Sorry about you luck man, and your lost files. I feel you..... :-(

 

[Night_Owl]

Droid RAZR Memory Card Encrypted just by Screen Lock

I only used the screen lock with a 4-digit pin, & when my battery went down to 0% overnight, I recharged it & when the phone rebooted, it came up with a prompt to enter a password to decrypt storage. I never selected the options to encrypt device or memory card since I didn't want to deal with remembering a password to get to my data quicky. I had to use the 4-digit pin to decrypt & access the phone. Before the battery went down, the screen lock came up overlayed onto the screen, & upon entering the pin, I could get to my phone & data. After I got access to my phone, upon checking the security settings, the device & memory card encryption boxes were checked. It did it on it's own when the phone went down to 0% or just by the screen lock.

A week later my sound went out on the phone & yes the volume was up. I called Verizon Tech Spt & when the 1st option of doing a cache partition wipe didn't work, he suggested resetting to factory default. I told the Tech about what happened the week before. He told me to save my data onto the memory card, then I powered down, took out the memory card, then did a factory reset. After adding the memory card & rebooting the phone, I was prompted with "SD Card has been secured by another device & can't be accessed unless formatted." Then another msg came up with "SD Card Password Protection: Failed to verify SD Card security settings. Encrypted content isn't accessible." Verizon suggested trying to upload to my PC to see if it was visible.

I put the memory card in my card adapter & tried to upload to my PC. It uploaded half of the pics & videos, but the others weren't accessible. I couldn't access my contacts file or SMS backup file.