v.2026-03-29
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SD Card ID

Windows Drive Letter

Windows has the concept of drive letters. When we put an sd card into the slot we can access files at something like E:\. This means we can copy files from one sd card to another and it will behave the same.

SD Card IDs

Every SD Card has a unique ID like 3636-3939 or 3761-3163. This becomes part of the path on android. For some reason android developers think this is better? Anyway we can change this Unique ID so every sd card has the same ID so Android won't suck.

Old Notes

I have 2 identically speced 1 TB SD Cards. When I put each one into an Android OS in same slot they show up with different paths. Why? This is irritating cuz all paths in settings files on android drive have to be fixed. Also this "seems" to be causing apps to just hang, because I think they keep looking for old paths. This means I might have to re-install and re-config apps. WTF Android. Dolphin-emu\Config\Dolphin.ini in Android\Data has the following path in it. ISOPath0 = content://com.android.externalstorage.documents/tree/3636-3939%3Agamecube I think on my new SD Card that # 3636-3939 is 3761-3163. Why? It appears there is something called a Volume ID or Serial Number. Apparently they wanted a way to know when the drive was switched. BUT this breaks all APPS on Android. Nice. It seems I should be able to duplicate the ID across SD Cards.
  1. https://www.diskpart.com/articles/change-sd-card-serial-number-7201.html
  2. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/volumeid
  3. https://www.wintips.org/how-to-change-hard-disks-volume-serial-number-volume-id/
  4. https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/change-volume-serial-number-of-a-new-micro-sd-card.3878805/
  5. https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/189104/sd-card-gets-different-name-at-every-format
Displaying Volume Serial Number on windows is possible on Command Prompt. Change to drive and issue a Dir Command we will get Volume Serial Number is 3761-3161 (OLD CARD) OR Volume Serial Number is 3636-3939 (NEW CARD) This is one area where windows makes more sense. Different SD Cards put in same slot will get H Drive or something. Not on android.