Tablet No Longer Reading SD Card Files, But Laptop Is - Fixable?

[slammerkin]

I have a Samsung Galaxy Tab A (9”), and a 132GB Sanidisk SD card I've been using with it for a little under 6 months. I've never had any issues with it until this morning- one minute it was fine, then my tablet started getting hinky. It would stall out or certain apps would stop working, even though I wasn't using them. Then it started saying “touch wizard home” was not working, and began restarting over and over. I realized the apps (save touch wizard) that were acting up were all ones stored on my SD card, so I unmounted it an took it out. The tablet was fine then, but when I reinserted the SD card, and mounted it, it wouldn't read any files. It does, however, show that 97 GB of the SD card's storage are used. I can mount and unmount, and the SD card shows as a folder when it's mounted, but the files on the actual card don't.

Fortunately, when I put the SD Card into my laptop, the files showed, and I'm currently in the (very long and slow) process of backing up the files on it, onto my laptop (which yes, I should have been doing all along, so I wouldn't have been stuck copying a massive amount of data in one fell swoop. I'm an idiot, I know).


When I put a different SD card into my tablet, it worked fine, so it's definitely related to the 132GB one specifically-and before I go for broke and just try to reformat it to possibly re-use, I wondered if there was any alternative ways to try to fix it first? I know there are tons of free apps, but I'm terrified of making things worse by downloading something I don't know- is there anything anyone can recommend? Please bear in mind that I'm not super tech savvy, and if you would be so kind, use layman's terms for anything above amateur level tech?



My tablet is NOT rooted, if that matters (I'd love to root it for the sake of file management, but my life is a bit akin to Murphy's law, and thus, I'm too scared to do it without actually knowing what I”m doing). Also, when I put the SD card into my laptop, it said the card needed to be fixed, so I ran the repair, but it said it couldn't fix it. However, I can access all my files, and my laptop says that 75% of the time with any SD card, brand new or used, so I don't know how relevant that is. I didn't download anything new prior to it crashing today, it just was fine one minute, and bombed the next.


Any advice/suggestions would be HUGELY appreciated. I'm self employed, and I store a mahoosive amount of work related files on this card, so if there's any way to recoup it without having to reformat or rebuy, then copy... I'm literally still backing up/copying files off the SD card to my laptop 6 hours later. I'm a driver, and I work nights- I keep all my customer manifests updated each shift on my tablet, and I already ran one day without them- if you know of any way to repair this thing in time for work tonight, i'll totally bake you cookies or something in gratitude


Thank you!

 

[Traveller]

On your PC, download SD Card Formatter - SD Association and install it. The program comes from the SD Association, meaning the people who set the SD Card standards, so it's safe to use. It will properly format the card for use, and can do other things depending on the capabilities of the card.