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I have a built in card reader that has always run my SD cards fine - but now it is balky when I try to read a PNY 4GB SDHC card. I think it read it at one time but not recently. I have tried to download the hotfixes I found in the knowledge base but 2 of them are apparently older than SP3 and the 3rd doesn't have an English language selection. In Device Manager, the system says the device is working properly. I have tried to update the driver but am told there is not a newer driver - I have tried to uninstall and reinstall the driver and that doesn't help either. Anybody have any other ideas or help?? I am using Windows XP Media Center edition with SP3 loaded in a Gateway desktop computer.
If this is any help - this card also does not open if I connect an external 2.0 USB card reader to this desktop - but this card works fine in my ACER netbook and in my Toshiba Satellite notebook - both running Windows XP.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Everyone!!!
You need to note that both the SD and SDHC "cards" have the exact same physical size but the internal electronics are different. To read a SDHC card, the reader MUST be able to read the SDHC electronics correctly. You can not read a SDHC card on a standard SD reader but a SDHC reader can read a SD card.
!! MICROSOFT THERE IS 6-7 THREADS WITH THIS ISSUE, PLEASE FIX IT !!
First off, this NOT where, you yell at microsoft. This is a community forum where LOTS of other people (Who don't work for Microsoft) attempt to help other users(Like yourself) with problems(Such as these).
I(NOT a Microsoft employee) am currently researching your issue for an answer. I will get back to you after I find anything. OR, after I don't find ANYTHING
"That which does not kill you, only postpones the inevitable." -Chaos
Last year sometime, I had an issue with an SD card reader. It screwed up the file system on the memory card due to some kind of poor connection problem inside the reader contacts with the memory card. It seems to have screwed up a set of at least 4 different camera images that were stored there.
By this same mechanism, I suppose such a screw up could have rendered the file system unmountable. A check disk operation may have caused the damage by writing what that program thought / believed to be corrections to the disk to properly repair the damage?
I was thinking of writing a memory card scanning program to examine blocks of sectors for JPEG headers and load as many sectors as it would take to get a clean image, then copy those raw sectors to a new file on a separate disk drive, and having a filename extension of .jpg. So, eventually if all of the missing files are recreated, I could copy the results back to the memory card. I have not worked out how I would determine the exact file size of the sectors read / written from / to disk, but this might be determined in GNU libjpeg at a low enough level where I could insert some kind of byte counter calculation on the incoming / decoded bytes.
Any situation where you have a poor electrical connection will render the hardware into an unknown / unusable state.
If the circuitry is SDHC, and is not smoked somehow, then by using contact cleaner and lubricant spray, the connectors should properly read and write to the card and avoid such problems. This stuff costs more than no-stick cooking spray, so I'll have to shop around to get some more because I ran out of it 6 years ago. A work colleague from the 1990s said that some of these sprays contain too much lubricant and less contact cleaner so that you end up having to shake the circuit board to get rid of excess liquid.
I have found that a 32 Gbyte USB 2.0 flash memory drive always seems to work properly. The advantages are that it knows what size it is (always 32 Gbytes), and that it does not have multiple sets of electrical contacts to be dirty and not make a good connection--it just has the USB lines. So, if any of you guys has a SDHC reader that worked at one time, but no longer works, maybe some contact cleaner might help. The contacts inside the reader and the memory card's contacts have to be clean enough so that the memory card's circuits can size the card to know whether or not to use SDHC access or not to the card that gets inserted.
I have had instances where a Microsoft update or Windows update changes a driver, and bingo, some applications or the driver become incompatible at some layer of handshaking between them. The only way to check for this is to try to reproduced the sequence of events by re-installing the operating system from scratch, testing functionality on each driver / update that is applied to find when the card reader begins to malfunction. Obviously, this can be a giant waste of a person's valuable time, so hire a cheap summer student or something? And let them play with pre-downloaded sets of patch upgrade files (on DVD / CD) or whatever on a clean, blank, new disk drive not connected to the internet. Alternatively, if you have one of those pre-packaged PCs with the operating system backed up on a separate OEM operating system install partition, then the new hard disk has to be used to backup all of your existing file system using either backup or whatever, and then re-install the OS from that partition and read upgrade files from the new hard drive's backup copy of your files.
It may be that a custom OEM driver file from the install is getting overwritten with an update that is not so customized and so does not fit as an exact replacement for the original OEM driver file?
Running a directory compare or something might be able to determine which files were changed in the driver's directory to see if any memory card reader-related files got changed?
!! MICROSOFT THERE IS 6-7 THREADS WITH THIS ISSUE, PLEASE FIX IT !!
I agree Hotjohn01, there so slow to react.
!! MICROSOFT THERE IS 6-7 THREADS WITH THIS ISSUE, PLEASE FIX IT !!
