Internal Flash card reader not being detected

thephilosophizer · July 10th, 2008, 11:32 PM

I just bought an internal flash card reader for the front of my pc so I can read my camera cards. It worked when I first installed it, and then after sleeping my computer and waking it up, it stopped working. So I rebooted and it started working again, but the same problem came back.
Any thoughts on this one? The brand is dynex, I got it cheap at best buy, at this point I am thinking of returning it and getting something better from the Egg.

EXreaction · July 10th, 2008, 11:39 PM

Are you using XP? XP has had a lot of issues with sleep mode.

thephilosophizer · July 10th, 2008, 11:44 PM

Yeah, I have xp sp3, I did also have issues with sleep when I first started trying to overclock my cpu, but those went away. Is there any other reason though that this could be happening?

EXreaction · July 10th, 2008, 11:49 PM

I would not recommend you use sleep mode on XP.

You said this issue only occurs after you bring it on from sleep mode?

thephilosophizer · July 11th, 2008, 12:06 AM

Well, I did figure something out. The drive stops working if I do "safely remove hardware" when I pull the card from the drive; when I try to put it back in after that, it stops working, and I have to reboot to get it back. Which means that now I think it isn't a sleep issue, and that that was just a coincidence. Though, I do also notice that the reader shows up as four removable devices in my computer, which I can make go away by doing the "safely remove hardware," but if I do that I can't get them back, and I don't like icons.
Might there be a way that I can do the safely remove hardware, but make it come back without rebooting?

DarkNexxus · July 11th, 2008, 07:23 AM

I'm not sure if this will be of any help or not.

Several months ago, I purchased a USB memory card reader. It was like a 12 in 1 model. Paid like 10 bucks at Newegg for it. I plugged it in, windows found it and installed it. No problem. I plug in a card, it reads it. It also added four new removable drives to my PC. (this was Xp with SP2 by the way).

When I plugged in one of my jump drives, I got an error saying that the drive was unreadable, or that windows couldn't install my new hardware. I was going nuts with this. They worked on my other machines, but not my personal one.

One day I unplugged the reader and my jump drive worked fine. I tried plugging in the memory card with the jump still hooked up, nada. Wouldn't read it. Unplug the jump, plug in the memory reader, and it worked fine.

So, if you have an external storage drive hooked up to your PC in any form, try unplugging that and then plugging in your memory reader.

If none of this applies to you, sorry to ramble so much!

excuzzzeme · July 11th, 2008, 09:15 AM

While hooked up and not functioning, I went into device manager, found the "bad" device, uninstalled then rebooted. Solved my problem. Don't know why but it did work.

XP SP3