Let my shame be your warning...don't delete Unknown from the Storage Manager

[occamsmonkey]

Yesterday I was cleaning up some internal storage on my 950 XL. I am on the public release and have just joined a new company who is 100% Microsoft technologies. I was cleaning off games and unused apps before joining the work network and came across an app called "Unknown" followed by a GUID on This Device. I was under the impression all system critical files were untouchable and there is no other system critical app in the list, so I had no reservations about deleting it.

After deleting the app, all text and iconography disappeared from every live tile on my phone. Any app that inherited the phone theme also lost its icon in the app list. Everything seemed to work though. I still got my email and most of my remaining apps launched. But it was pretty unusable. Store would no longer launch and presented me with a sad little emoticon lamenting my stupidity and judging me from the other side of the glass. It knew I had messed up.

Poking around further, I found that my windows account link had been what was removed. I have no idea why or what happened. But Accounts was blank and I couldn't do anything with it. I couldn't even soft reset the phone. I had to do a hardware factory reset using the power/volume buttons.

Everything is back to normal finally, but it was quite a pain. So if you see Unknown sitting in your storage management list...don't touch it. You'll go blind.

 

[mtf1380]

Thanks for the "heads-up", occamsmonkey. Sorry for your pain

 

[OHardy]

Much appreciated occamsmonkey.

 

[danchristerg]

Thanks for this!

Posted via the Windows Central App for Android

 

[kristalsoldier]

Thanks for the heads up! Glad you got your stuff worked out!

 

[vezycash]

The underlying OS is looking more like Windows... easy to screw things up

 

[Mohd Fadil A]

thanks

 

[Chintan Gohel]

Could it have been that accounts was not recognised and hence labelled unknown?

 

[Karl Vincent Alvarez]

thanks for the heads up!

 

[Tullphan]

Thanks for the heads up. Glad you got it back & running.

 

[occamsmonkey]

I think it was something like that. I'm wondering if during upgrade the "system/hidden" flag got removed on the account security package.

 

[slyronit]

Ha Ha so you finally found a way to remove your default MSS account from the phone without doing a factory reset?

 

[Joe920]

Thanks for the tip and​ the laugh.