What to do if your SD card is not detected by your Samsung Galaxy J2 Pro 2019 (easy steps)

Samsung’s new Galaxy J2 Pro 2018 smartphone originally comes with a 16GB ROM or internal memory. Apparently, this won’t be enough to allocate everything especially if you’re fond of downloading new apps and multimedia contents. Good thing this phone also supports an expandable memory of up to 256 gigabytes. And to make use of this extra space, an SD card is needed. But the problem is, your phone does not detect your SD card. Perhaps the SD card is defective or something in your phone system is preventing it from reading the SD card. This therefore denotes the need for you to find out the culprit so as to augment your phone’s storage capacity.

Before we proceed, if you’re looking for a solution to a problem with your phone, try to browse through our troubleshooting pages to see if we support your device. If your phone is in the list of our supported devices, then go to the troubleshooting page and look for similar problems. Feel free to use our solutions and workarounds. Don’t worry it’s free. But if you still need our help, then fill up our Android issues questionnaire and hit submit to contact us.

How to troubleshoot Galaxy J2 Pro 2018 that can’t detect your SD card

Before you start troubleshooting software problems that might have caused your SD card to become corrupted or not readable by your phone (or vice versa), verify and ensure that the SD card you are using is compatible or supported by your phone. You may visit the Samsung Support website to view what type of SD cards work with the Samsung Galaxy J2 Pro 2018 smartphone. If you’ve confirmed that your SD card is compatible with the J2 Pro 2018 and yet it is still unreadable or not detected, then you may go ahead and begin to troubleshoot your device with these methods.

First solution: Perform a soft reset or reboot your phone.

If this is the first time your phone failed to recognize your SD card, then it’s probably just a random glitch which can easily be rectified by a soft reset or device restart. Having said that, reboot your Galaxy J2 Pro 2018 with these steps:

Press and hold the Power button for a few seconds.
From the menu options, select Power off and then tap OK.
After about 30 seconds, press the Power button again until your device power cycles.

Wait until your phone boots up completely then try if it’s now able to read your SD card. If it still isn’t, then move on to the next possible solution.

Second solution: Unmount the SD card.

Unmounting the card can help fix minor data corruption on your SD card system. There might be some files or data segments on your SD card that’s corrupted. So try to unmount your SD card with these steps, reboot your phone, then mount the SD card again with these steps:

Go to Settings.
Tap Device Maintenance.
Tap on the Storage icon at the bottom right side of the screen.
From the storage screen, tap the Menu icon on the upper right.
Then tap Storage settings.
Tap the Eject icon.

If it shows that the SD card is corrupted, turn your phone off and then remove the SD card. Place the SD card into a computer and see if you still can copy your files from the card. Your card likely needs to be formatted for you to use it again. Doing so will delete all your files stored in the card. After unmounting the SD card, you can remove the card safely from your phone with these steps:

Turn your phone off.
Remove the back cover.
Remove the battery.
Gently pull the SD card out from the SD card slot.
Check the SD card for any sign of damage. If it looks good to you, then place it back into the SD card slot in the same manner as when you removed it.
Place the battery back in.
Put the back cover back on.

And when everything is secured, turn your phone back on.

Third solution: Update your device software.

Updating your phone to the latest Android version available can help make it bug-free. Hence if your Galaxy J2 Pro 2018 failed to read your SD card because of certain bugs, then that should be resolved with an update. To check for new software update wirelessly or over-the-air, follow these steps:

Go to Settings.
Tap About.
Select Software Update or Update.

You will see an update notification if a new software version is available for download. For safekeeping, be sure to back up your files beforehand. Then follow the onscreen instructions to proceed with update downloading and installation.

Fourth solution: Format your SD card.

If your phone still failed to detect your SD card after performing all prior methods, then you may need to erase everything from your SD card. It’s possible that your SD card is totally corrupted and so it’s not working unless it’s reformatted. Formatting the SD card will result to data loss. If you want to give it a shot, then you may proceed with these steps:

Go to Settings.
Tap Storage.
Scroll down to and select SD card.
Select the option to Format SD card.
Tap Format to confirm.

Don’t forget to reboot your phone when the SD card formatting is finished. It’s possible that certain apps or the device itself would glitch if it’s not rebooted.

Other options

Insert your SD card to a compatible computer. If none of the above solutions can fix the problem and your Galaxy J2 Pro 2018 still cannot detect your SD card, then try to insert the SD card into a computer with the same SD card support system. If the computer can recognize or detect your SD card, then apparently the issue is on your phone. It could be a more complex system error or worst hardware damage that you need to deal with.

Restore factory defaults or master reset. Performing a full system reset is likely what’s needed if the problem is attributed to a system bug, malware, or other intricate software errors on the phone. This will wipe everything out from your phone system and allows it to have a clean fresh start. Just don’t forget to back up all your critical data, personal information and important apps before you proceed.
Use another compatible SD card. If you have a spare similar SD card, try to use that and see if your phone can read your other card. Doing so will help you determine if the problem is with the current SD card you are using or not. If the other SD card is detected, then you’ll need to replace your SD card.
Service/repair options. If your Galaxy J2 Pro 2018 is unable to read any SD card at all, then it may require service as it’s possible that your device has acquired some sort of physical or liquid damage particularly on the SD card slot. This is when a technician’s aid would be necessary

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