Question Thumb drive erased on Android, partitions and everything ?

[Wraith_3]

I got a Sandisk 128GB thumb drive and partitioned it so my niece would have space to backup her phone and then have all our family pictures with her. So I created two partitions named "Pictures" and "Backup". I checked the files last night and everything was fine. When she put it in her phone today, and I didn't see what she did or didn't do, the files and partitions got nuked. I didn't think you could change partitions without going in and manually deleting the volumes. I thought maybe she maybe accidentally hit "Format" or something, but I wouldn't think format would remove the partitions. I checked in disk management and the thumb drive is back to factory conditions, even going back to exFAT from NTFS. Any idea what happened?

 

[TerryLaze]

If the phone didn't recognise the drive at all it would initialize it which would turn it back to completely empty with the default filesystem the phone uses for drives.
NTFS is not freeware so my guess is that not many phone makers use it to avoid license fees, but that's just a guess.

 

[Wraith_3]

No it was recognized it just wiped it somehow. I tested it on my own Android phone and could see the files, change folders, etc.

 

[TerryLaze]

No it was recognized it just wiped it somehow. I tested it on my own Android phone and could see the files, change folders, etc.

Do you both have the exact same phone?
Did her phone ever use a NTFS usb before?

 

[Wraith_3]

It's not the same phone. My phone would read it and allow me to browse the pictures. I've seen conflicting info when I search, some says Samsung phones support NTFS, while others say Android phones don't and won't even read a drive with that format. Either way, I could see the phone not being able to read it and just saying it was empty, but completely erasing everything is odd. She doesn't remember what she did, but I can see her accidentally clicking something if it asked to format or something, so maybe that's what happened.

 

[TerryLaze]

I could see the phone not being able to read it and just saying it was empty, but completely erasing everything is odd. She doesn't remember what she did, but I can see her accidentally clicking something if it asked to format or something, so maybe that's what happened.

That's my guess.
"You need to initialise the disk to use it" ,and if you have no idea that initialise means delete everything, you just press ok without even thinking about it.

 

[Wraith_3]

That's what I'm guessing she did. So I'm just going to put everything back on the drive using exFAT and tell her all the words to avoid!