Do Not Remove the SD Card From the Venue Pro
Allow me to take you on the journey of how I discovered that taking out the SD card from your Venue Pro will totally screw up your phone. So I wanted to run a simple performance test on the SD card inside my Venue Pro. Completely forgot that the sticker covering the port was a void warranty sticker(I’m really forgetful). Remembered when I saw “VOID” written in caps on the sticker after pulling it off. Oh well, too late to turn back now. I pull the SD card out and grab an old Nokia phone to format it.
Formatting complete, I put the card into my card reader and ran my tests. While running the tests I wanted to see if the Venue Pro would still work without the SD card. To my surprise it worked fine. The device shows about 15MB of total space instead of the usual 16GB and all my apps are deleted but it worked.
Once my tests were completed I placed the SD card back inside the Venue Pro and proceeded to reset my device. I navigated to the settings app, scrolled down to “about” and hit “reset your phone”. The phone rebooted itself and I was expecting to be greeted by the usual screen asking me to log into WindowsLIVE. However, this was not the case. I was instead dropped directly into the home screen. All the default apps were still missing and this made me a little worried. I navigated back to the about screen and found that the phone had not recognized the SD card.
I then took out my card, put it back into my PC and formatted it to FAT32 and repeated the whole process above. No change. I tried exFAT and then just deleting the partition altogether and nothing worked. I tried resetting with the battery out, while plugged into AC power, with and without the sim inserted. Nothing worked. I thought maybe I screwed up the SD card, so I tried using an extra 8GB card I had laying around. The problem continued. After awhile I decided to load up the diagnostic screen. According to the diagnostic app, a SD is recognized as being inserted. It can also tell that It’s a 16GB card. However it reports that the card is “not OK”. Not sure why this is, but this is bad news for me. Now I’m stuck with a Venue Pro which doesn’t have enough memory space to even pull contacts from WindowsLIVE or Gmail. And every time I power off, all the system settings are lost. Anyone got any ideas on what I should do? I’m wide open to suggestions and pretty desperate at this point.
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damn homie….life must be uneasy at this point!
Try what you can do with a Samsung Focus. Insert the card (with phone off). Then press Volume Control Down+Camera Key+Power Key to format the phone and initialize the card. The (settings app, scrolled down to “about” and hit “reset your phone) is more of a ‘soft’ reset. Should work.
@ramon yea…it sucks…
@Greg, tried that too, whenever I press the camera key it prompts me to plug into a PC. When I do so, Zune tries to “restore” my device but always fails.
I guess you can bring it to a Microsoft store and if the employees ask, said that you couldn’t see the VOID on the sticker. Hey, it works for someone else.
This may be of help: http://mynokiablog.com/2010/11/16/n8-saves-the-day-formats-josh-topolskys-fried-memory-card/
@arktronic that only helps you remove the security lock Windows Phone puts on the device and I already used a nokia device to unlock the SD card. Now i need the Venue Pro to relock the SD card so that it can be used by the device again
I know this doesn’t help and I really do hope you get this sorted out, but, it’s just yet another reason not to buy a WP7.
@Mike: why? because you can’t do something you was told not to do? nice!
My memory whatever has a little foil label covering it and that’s the way it will stay. Guess they should have used rivets.
if Dell has the firmware on their site, flashing it may also flash the card, worth a shot
I seem to remember reading somewhere that you need to use a Nokia N8 to reformat your card(and only the N8. I don’t know why it will only work with the N8, I will try to locate the article in question for a refresher read.
That’s right, the N8 only.
@BRYAN B: using a nokia device to format the card only removes the security lock windows phone puts on a sd card. I have already dont this, what I need is for windows phone to recognize the card again(Which should happen after a reset to factory settings but isn’t occurring.
@Kacey Green: I’ve looked, believe me! haha it’s a no go on the Dell site for firmware.
Get a 32gb sd card class 6.. then do a factory reset through the about box. It should update your phone fine.
Well, the previous batch of Dell Venue Pro has an issue where it wouldn’t read the microSD. I guess you can trade it at the Microsoft Store.
@Brianna: I think you’re right and my phone is just having issues with the SD card. Unfortunately I cant trade it at a MS store as the nearest one to me is about 9hrs away. Dell doesnt have any Venue Pros on hand apparently so I will have to wait until they have one to spare for me.
try finding someone with a focus who doesnt mind you possibly messing up thier phone, and try formatting your card in the focus, then put it back in your venue pro. about the only thing i can think of since it wants to see a “windows phone lock” and the focus (and maybe a t-mobile WP7 device) should have the ability to format it for you
I just ran into a similar issue. I got the 8GB Venue Pro and I wanted to upgrade it to 32GB. I removed the 8GB card, put in the 32GB card and then reset it. No beans. It still said it only had 15MB of space.
What I had to do was put in the original 8GB card, go to the settings section and start the factory reset. Once the screen went blank, I pulled the battery out and swapped in the 32GB card. When I started up the phone it brought up the OOBE wizard to set up the phone, and now it is properly reporting 29.90GB 🙂
I know it’s slightly different than your situation, but it may help you sometime.
I don’t know if the lock is tied to the specific device, or if you can swap them around between phones. If it’s not, you may be able to get a card from someone else’s phone (like my old 8GB card… ) and do the same thing I did to trick the phone into formatting your 16GB card.
@sm0k3ydaband1t: The lock on the cards are tied to the device that formatted it so it will not be possible to have someone else format it for me.
@mungu: Thanks for the tip! Will try it out in a bit. How’s the 32GB card working out for you? Any noticeable drop in performance? Which card did you use?
@@Danny Lam: I just got the phone tonight. So far it seems just as snappy as my wife’s HD7. I am loading Apps & Music on it now, so we’ll see how it fares when it is loaded up. I got a SanDisk Class4 card
@mungu: Hope you enjoy it! I love mine to death!(minus the part about it crashing and me breaking it haha) Too bad you dont have a point of reference, would love to find a good 32GB card to swap in there. Just FYI I found the DVP to be generally faster than the HD7. Only time it wasn’t was when it crashed or froze on me.
@mungu: No luck with pulling the battery after reseting it to factory settings…I think it’s just my phone. It doesn’t even respond to a hardware reset, which it’s supposed to…
@Danny Lam: Ahh. that’s unfortunate.. best of luck getting this resolved
I wonder how did you manage to format it, because none of my laptops can\t even detect the card.
Did You solve the problem? Because i have got almost the same…
@mxx.lu: I sent my phone back and had it replaced, but you could try to use the Windows Phone Support Tool to see if that will fix it.
You may need a brand new SDHC card Class 4 Minimum. You can even try a 32 GB
1) Go to settings to reset the phone. As soon as you see the Dell Logo pull out the battery.
2)Insert the new SDHC card.
You should be good to go.
You can try that with the old one too. Either it is not 100% proof.
Good Luck