PC will no longer read SD Card

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My desktop PC (Win7 Pro, 64 bit) has 2 SD Card readers. One built in to the PC itself, the other, a slot on the side of my Dell monitor. Both of these – until last week – would read and write to my various SD cards with no problem. Cards ranging in size from 1 to 16Gb. Both readers worked fine with SDHC cards.

NOW, when I insert a card, I hear the usual “bing-bong” to signify that I’ve inserted a removable disk and the Windows “Safely Remove Hardware” icon becomes available. But if I double-click on the disk/drive in Explorer it tells me to insert a removeable disk into that particular letter.

I have also determined that Windows know that there’s *something* in the drive, as Disk Manager shows a drive of the correct size, with the partition type marked as RAW.

The cards themselves are fine – they work perfectly well in my cameras, and more importantly, they work perfectly fine in my laptop’s SD Card reader.

So something in Windows has gone amiss – but what? Something that’s caused 2 totally different readers to fail simultaneously. I’ve removed and reinstalled both readers with known good drivers and that hasn’t sorted it. I even tried to format (in Disk Manager) one of the cards but it did nothing, just sat there for ages. Taking that card to the other PC or a camera it then formats just fine in just a few seconds. And still doesn’t work in my desktop PC.

Any ideas or help would be gratefully tried!

Steven

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Do these Readers show up in Device Manager. I have SD Host Adapter in my Device Manager. If so I would delete them in Device Manager and reboot. Upon reboot Windows will reload the appropriate S/W for them.

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Check to ensure that “ready boost” is not active and attempting to use the drive.

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Hi CLiNT and Ted,

Thanks for your thoughts.

Ted, yes they show up in Device Manager and as noted in my final paragraph I removed both and reinstalled with known good drivers in case something had managed to bork both sets of drivers for both readers simultaneously. That didn’t fix the problem.

CLiNT, no ReadyBoost isn’t active. In fact I can’t activate it for my SD Cards as the ReadyBoots prefs tab doesn’t appear under the drive’s properties. Explorer thinks I have nothing in the slot. ReadyBoost *is* working correctly (although I don’t use it) with USB flash drives.

Steven

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Have you tried resetting Autoplay back to default settings?

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Hi CLiNT,

I hadn’t because Autoplay doesn’t activate when any SD Card is inserted. (It used to.) Autoplay still works as expected when plugging in a USB flash drive or external HDD or an optical disk.

I’ve just checked to see what would happen, if anything, if Autoplay was disabled, but it doesn’t make any difference.

Steven

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Do any of your SDHC cards have a write protection tab that may have inadvertently been switched on?

What has been done to the system in the time prior to the card issue, and after the last known good read/write to the cards?

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Hi CLiNT,

Again, thanks for your thoughts. No the write protect tabs haven’t been accidentally switched on on all my cards.

“What was done to the system?” I guess you mean regarding software? Nothing new has been installed, the desktop machine in particular is a work at home PC (as opposed to a family machine or a games machine)

However, it’s probably been a month or so since the last time the cards worked in this particular PC, so there’s been all the usual Windows Updates that you’d expect over a month or so. And a load of Adobe software seems to have been updated recently.

But of course the same updates would’ve also been added to my laptop PC and although I haven’t mentioned them before, also to the Windows Bootcamp partitions on my 2 Mac machines.

As you can see this is both puzzling and frustrating. I have 3 other machines where the cards work fine.

I’ve also done an experiment today:

I took one of my SD Cards and using Disk Manager (which showed it as “RAW”) formatted it. It was an 8Gb card and it took about 30 minutes to format which I thought was a long time. After formatting, Windows recognised the card and I was able to read and write to it. However after I ejected the card and reinserted it, it went back to showing as “RAW” and yet again, Windows refused to access it.

I then put the card in my camera where it was recognised fine, I could even see the pics I’d copied back to it while Windows *was* seeing it properly.

So there’s *something* wrong with just one of my 4 computers which is stopping Windows from seeing SD Cards correctly. But what the devil could it be?

Steven

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Yeah, sound like a Windows 7 issue specific to only this one computer.
If this is your work-at-home computer, how often does it get shut down?

Try shutting down your computer, turn the PSU switch to the off position, then press the front power switch.
Leave the computer off for about 5 min, then restart everything. See if a cold shutdown helps. It has been known on occasion
to help with similar issues.

If the above doesn’t help, try assigning a different/dedicated drive drive letter to each of the card readers, followed by the same cold shutdown/restart as above.

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It gets shut down every night at about 6pm, fires up the next morning about 8am, so that’s already covered. Will try your other suggestion tomorrow. Thanks. Steven

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I am having the same problem with Win7 32bit. Prior to the March 2013 update Win7 would read the drive contents on my Nook tablet, SD cards and USB connected drives. Now a windows pop-up indicates that I have to reformat my drives. Chkdsk indicates that the drives are operating correctly and all cards and disks are readable on XP. Reformatting the Nook and my Nikon camera cards is not an option, as the devices would no longer be operable. A few other web discussion groups contain similar threads with some dating back to 2009. The similarity in all the discussions was that no one knew a solution.

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Hi rdekoschak,

Yeah, sure sounds like you’re experiencing a similar problem to me. And like you, I’ve seen the same thing mentioned in other groups. It’s been over a year for me and I’ve never been able to find a solution. Reformatting my main PC is not an option!

My workaround is to use my laptop to get pics off my SD cards then use my home network to send them across to the desktop PC for archiving. Annoying but usable. Cheers.

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It is now 2014
Got a ASUS Transformer AIO on Win 8
……and I got the same problem

Did you ever found a solution ?

.

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Hi Watford,

Nope, never found a solution to this particular problem. I’m still using the same desktop PC and I still can’t read SD cards in either reader. I’d posted the same question on a couple of forums apart from this one, and despite a few kind people giving me all sorts of suggestions, nothing ever worked. So as per my last post above, I continue to use my laptop to extract my photos then transfer them to the desktop PC after doing so.

Steven

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If your PC is also a Dell, have you tried Dell’s Diagnostics with and without the card(s) inserted ?

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I bought my usb flash card reader online both seemed to have worked till I plugged in my usb expansion to add more ports. Now it just recognizes the usb flash, but when sd card is in, it doesn’t recognize it. I think the usb expansion is causing an interference. Does anyone agree?

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I am not sure if this applies here, but I have a multi-card USB reader mounted in my desktop. Occasionally when I insert a SDHC card, a static discharge will cause the entire reader to become unknown to Windows (forever if I don’t do something). If I remove the USB cable for the reader from the motherboard connector and re-insert it while the system is running, Windows will find and install the device again.

The reader can also be restarted by removing the cable during power off, rebooting, then power off and insert the cable, reboot and all is back.

If the device can be identified in Device Manager, it can be removed and then it will be found again by Windows on next reboot.

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Hi Sudo15, it’s not a Dell so I can’t use that tool. One of the SD card readers is contained within my Dell monitor though – that reader works perfectly fine when I connect the monitor to my laptop.

And thanks too JC. The other reader is a breakout box connected directly to the motherboard. The other sockets on the breakout box (USB 3.0, CF card, Memory Stick) all work fine. Windows sees each thing in the breakout box as a separate device. They can all be removed individually in Device Manager and they reappear on re-boot. As can the SD and CF readers in the monitor. The SD Card readers are seen (but still fail to work) if removed and re-discovered (as per my first 2 posts).

I don’t know what’s causing this but I’m confident it’s not a hardware issue given that 2 different readers are giving identical results.

Steven

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This also may not resolve the problem. Try running ‘sfc /scannow’ from an administrator command prompt to see if any system files have got corrupted.

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Just wondering if anything may show up in msinfo32/Components/Problem Devices ?

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Thanks curiousclive and sudo15 apologies for the delay in responding, have been on hols!

Sudo15: No, there’s nothing listed there.
curiousclive: Took an hour and a half to run that but sadly, although it *did* restore a couple of corrupted files, it hasn’t fixed my problem.

Steven

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This happened to me on my win8 machine after I was fooling around with my nook trying to upgrade my android version. Look under device manager for any reference to Android and if you find one and don’t have a android device, remove the reference and see if that helps. I’ll try to locate the thread where I read that.

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I have an external card reader. I always put the card into the card reader first, and I then plug the card reader into the USB jack. Then, when I’m done, I turn the device off using the icon in the system tray, then unplug the card reader from the USB port, and then remove the card from the card reader.

In this way, the card is never inserted or removed from a “live” device; the card reader is always “dead” whenever I insert or remove the card.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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It seems the USB data pins (or the card reader’s many pins) are intermittent or barely connected, then PC reads the SD card as ‘raw’, even if the card is formatted. I had that problem with a USB external hard drive box (reporting that the NTFS drive was raw!).
Try a new card reader and plug it into a USB port in the rear, of the USB PCI/PCIe card. If the new reader is OK, it is either the USB cable or the card reader pins of the old reader(s) that causes the problem, or both.

Change to a different USB port sometimes helps. Pin mating is now to a new connector. This is especially truth for USB2.0 cable mating to USB3.0 socket. USB3.0 socket has even smaller pins (metallic swipers). Over time, I find that the more muscular (bigger) USB2.0 pins cause early failure of the 3.0 port.

There is also a remote possibility that the registry entries on the card reader(s) is/are corrupted. Each time you plug in a USB device, it is recorded in the registry. Same USB device to a different port? Write a brand new entry even. Erase all the USB registry entries, to start fresh, helps.
Always make a registry backup first before editing the registry. There are USB registry entry cleanup software (portable, no need to install) such as DriveCleanup, USBOblivion.

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http://www.online-tech-tips.com/computer-tips/windows-7-wants-to-format-your-usb-drive-ipod-and-sd-card/

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Once when I popped into diskmgmt.msc I found that the drive letter for my DVD drive had been changed from E: to F: which is what is normally allocated for my external HDD – don’t know if that had any effect on the DVD player as I just changed the letter back without trying the disk drive.

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I think you have summed up the problem nicely. Are you able to use a different port for the USB expansion hub to the one you use for the card reader? How many USB ports does your computer have?

cheers, Paul

p.s. In future it’s worth opening a new thread for a new problem.

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Re: USB expansion hub causing problems to read SD card.

Specifications (5V supply, 4.75V-5.25V):
USB2.0, each port: Default 0.5A, some PC+OS can optionally select 1A
USB3.0, each port: Default 0.9A
If overloaded, the 5V with decrease (no more proper logic signal) or fused-open. [Recoverable fuse type.]

If a non self-powered hub uses much of that current itself, not much left to power up the card reader, or the reader + SD card in it.

Think of a 4-port USB2.0 hub. If all 4 ports need 500mA each at the same time, then 2A supply is required!
A USB3.0 port of a PC can supply 0.9A max.
A 4-port USB3.0 hub, with all 4 ports drawing 0.9A each, would need a 5V/3.6A supply! The sole 0.9A from the PC does not cut it.

Two solutions (depending on the PC hardware and the OS):
1. In Windows Device Manager, at the USB port that connected to the hub, select higher than 500mA, say 1A. If you then plug the hub to another USB port on the PC, you have to do it again at that specific port. May not work if hardware/OS does not have the option.
2. Always buy a USB hub with a power connector. You then have the option to power the hub. No more power starving problem.

Warning:
Best is unplug power from the hub first, before power-off the PC.

Some USB hubs do not have protection built-in – The 5V from the hub may back-supply the 5V bus of the PC.
Some laptops may get damaged. Some may not boot up but no damage.
Almost all desktop PC power supplies can withstand the abuse without damage. Some may only refuse to boot up but no damage.
Hint: if you see the PC power light glowing faintly (when off) – back-supply fault!

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Some USB hubs do not have protection built-in – The 5V from the hub may back-supply the 5V bus of the PC

What a pain that is! All sorts of weirdness results.

cheers, Paul

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