N8 saves the day, formats Josh Topolsky’s “fried” memory card.

As I’m sure we’ve all heard in tech news lately, Windows Phone 7 devices have a nasty nack for screwing up the memory cards of any individual adventurous enough to ignore the warning Microsoft gave when they said DO NOT USE with regards to third-party memory cards. Unfortunately for users of the Samsung Focus, including a certain Engadget editor, this device once used in the device is nigh-on useless when removed and tried in others. Imagine buying a 32Gb card and not being able to use it anywhere else (I’d be outraged). While it’s clearly not Microsoft or Samsung’s fault for users being disobedient, it’s still a sucky predicament to be in, especially if important or irreplaceable files are on this memory card.

See more information on the problem here.

 

Seems that one of our readers sent a slight tip to Mr. Topolsky via twitter on how to correct his unfortunate problem. Funnily enough no other methods worked and this includes attempting to format it using a Linux PC.

Here’s the transcript Antonio provided us.

“Full story: Engadget chief editor Joshua Topolsky was doing some tests with his MicroSD on a brand new Samsung Focus with WP7. The Focus formatted the SD and (I don’t know for sure, but I think) it worked on the phone, but then he could not remove and still use the MicroSD later. As Topolsky mentioned, the Focus “fried” his SD card.

He mentioned on twitter he had tried putting the microSD card (to format it) in some cameras. None worked. He also tried on his Windows PC with several programs to format SD cards suggested by other people on twitter. None of the programs worked, the SD card wasn’t even recognized and would not format. Then people told him Ubuntu was the solution and it would definitely fix the SD card with success, and gave him some advanced SD formatting tools. None worked.

It was just when I read his tweet asking for help that I knew I had the definitive solution to his problem: I told him to put the SD card into the Nokia N8 and I told him it would work, and the phone would fix his microSD card successfully. And that’s exactly what happened.”

 

Obviously Josh ignored him (for good reason he’d have thought)

 

“He didn’t seem to have noticed, so I insisted. I didn’t know whether it was a SD or MicroSD card because he was just saying SD card on his twitter, so I gave him a solution that would also work for SD cards (using a SD card reader on the N8; please notice this is not necessary for microSD cards because the N8 already has a microSD slot).”

 

Josh’s replies are below.

LOL!

Guess the phone doesn’t suck so bad after all huh 😛 🙂

Thanks Antonio!