SmartPhone running low on memory due to Storage Card recognition

For some reason, my SmartPhone was giving me a message that memory was full. I hadn’t done anything to it to cause this: no new software installation or configuration, so I investigated a little further.

A few of my applications didn’t work either: a message would say that components of the application couldn’t be found.

I hooked it up to ActiveSync and used Windows Explorer to look at the files.

To my surprise, I saw that there were folders called “Storage Card” and “Storage Card2”. One of these was my 1 Gig memory card. I don’t know where the other came from. I redirected my Outlook Inbox to the Storage Card by changing a few registry keys to point to “Storage Card”. Apparently, somehow the storage card wasn’t recognized (perhaps on reboot), so Outlook created a folder called “Storage Card”. When the internal memory card was recognized, it was added to the OS as “Storage Card2” because there was already a folder called “Storage Card’.

Many of my internal applications were installed to “Storage Card” so they didn’t function because they were really on “Storage Card2”. So I thought I could fix it by renaming “Storage Card” to “Storage Cardx”, then renaming “Storage Card2” to “Storage Card”. Of course this didn’t work because I got access denied error messages.

So I took the storage card out of the phone, restarted it, renamed the “Storage Card” to “Storage Card2” folder, shut down the phone, reinstalled the memory card, and everything is back to normal (I deleted the extra temp “Storage Cardx’ folder).