Card reading problem

Hi, I run Windows XP, SP2, on a 3,4 GHz, 2 GB RAM PC. For a few years I've been using a USB connected card reader to download pictures from memory cards to harddisk. A few weeks back a problem has suddenly developed. When I put the card in the reader, Explorer says "The diskette is not formated. Do you want to format now ?" Things I've tried and things noted so far: - Tried another card reader : No effect - Tried both card readers on another PC : Works fine - Tried other cards and other card types : Same behavour, works fine on other PC's but not on mine - Removed reader from PC via Device manager & via Registry editing, and then restarted and re-attached reader an wathched drivers get reinstalled: No effect - Downloaded and installed latest firmware for card reader (SanDisk ImageMate 12 in 1): No effect - Put card back in camera and connected camera to my PC via USB cable : Works fine ! - Tried installing SP3 on my PC: No effect - Tried connecting reader via different USB ports and different cables: No effect - The USB ports work fine with any other device (microphone, joystick, mouse & keyboard, etc) - Explorer recognizes that the reader is attached and displays volumes, but whatever card is inserted it still says it is not formated. - If I try to format cards via the reader on my PC, Explorer says the formatting could not be completed. - Same cards, via same reader format OK on other PC's - My hard drive is NTFS, cards are FAT or FAT32 All trials made with multiple different readers and multiple different cards. Whatever I try, the cards read fine on other PC's but my PC cannot read them via any card reader. Grateful for any suggestion on the cause of this behavious, and on how to fix it.

Hi, welcome to WTT.

Follow directions in the MS article, see if that helps: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310575

If not, try this, often helps:

Shutdown and unplug all USB devices.
Boot to BIOS Setup and load defaults (F5 or F9 usually).
Boot XP, open a command prompt, enter set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1. Leave the command prompt window open.
Open Device Manager, click on View then Show hidden devices. Scroll down to USB and click on the plus to expand it. Uninstall them one at a time. DO NOT uninstall your mouse if you are using a USB mouse.
Shutdown and reboot, let XP rediscover everything and load necessary drivers. This can take a few minutes, be patient.

Now try the USB device, see what happens.

I've tried to test your suggestions, and I believe I did it in the right order, but … - the Cards are still not accepted via the card reader, but that is is now the lesser problem ….. - another BIGGER problem has come up: My PC now doesn't recognize my D: and E: drives (DVD RW unit and DVD reader respectively.) I.e. it displays the volume letters in Explorer, but doesn't read anything from the CD or DVD. After XP has started, it now indicates it has found new hardware and tries to install a "control unit for a storage unit" (hope I got this translated correctly. My PC runs Swedish version). It tries to do this autmatically but finds no driver. I have not attached anything new, beyond what was connected originally. Where did I go wrong, and what do I need to do to get it working again? HELP !

Hi, while testing and trying, I've noticed 2 more points: - Windows media player can still play a CD record from the DVR-RW drive. It is not possibe to see any content on the CD from the Explorer though - USB memory sticks are also not readable. Like with SD cards via the card reader, explorer want to format the stick (which works OK on other PC's) - I can still put the SD card in my camera and the PC will read and download via a USB post. The camera does not show up as a "letter volumne" in explorer, just as "Canon G9 camera" I am concerned about the DVD drives. If I decide to format the hard drive and reinstall Windows, will the PC be able to open the installation disc ? Hope this can give more basis for your suggestions ? /Kent

Copy the red text below. Open Notepad and paste it in. Save the result in a suitable location as drives.reg - making sure that the default .txt extension doesn't appear in the file name (Save as type = All Files). Double-click on the saved drives.reg file to merge the contents (or right click and select Merge) then reboot . See if this helps.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}]
"UpperFilters"=-
"LowerFilters"=-

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdr4_2K]

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdralw2k]

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdudf]

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\UdfReadr]


Before you make any changes to the registry, please back it up. An excellent way to do this is to install ERUNT. Let it add an entry to your Start menu during the install process. That will allow ERUNT to backup your registry each time you boot. It only takes a few seconds and has no real impact on boot time. Run ERUNT immediately after installing it to create a full registry backup.

I installed ERUNT and created a registry back-up. I then created and merged drivers.reg and re-booted The problems remain though, no effect on behaviour. SD cards, CD's, USB sticks aren't read. No idea if this is related to the main problems, but : Every time I boot the PC, MSN takes a looong time to start, and sometimes doesn't make it at all. I can see the LAN blink on the router, but that's all. Thanks for your patience and help. /Kent

How does it behave if you boot to Safe Mode with Networking? If better then something is starting at boot that is causing the problem. Try the following:

First, physically disconnect from the Internet to prevent a malware infection while your Anti-virus and/or Firewall are disabled in the following steps, then boot to Safe Mode.

Click on Start then Run, type msconfig and press Enter.
Click on the Startup tab then the Disable All button.
Do a regular boot, see if it runs normal.
If yes then use msconfig to enable several items at a time till you find the culprit.

If no, boot to Safe Mode again, start msconfig and click on the Services tab.
Check the Hide All Microsoft Services box then click the Disable All button.
Again, do a regular boot, see if it runs normal.
If yes then use msconfig to enable services till you find the culprit.

Once you've found the culprit, uninstall it or find out how to eliminate it from your system. Simply disabling it in msconfig is a temporary fix at best. Enable everything else you disabled.

If Safe Mode stuff doesn't help, try booting a Linux "Live" CD like Puppy Linux or one of the other bootable CD packages like EBCD, UBCD or best of all, UBCD4WIN. See if you can access the DVD drives and USB devices that way. If yes then Windows is the culprit. If no then I'd say you have developed hardware problems.

See this post by Happyrck on GeeksToGo for Puppy Linux:
http://www.geekstogo.com/…..=findpost&am…21#entry1197721
Ignore the stuff about saving data, you just need the info on downloading and creating the Puppy Linux bootable CD.

These two are iso images you download then use your burner software to create the bootable CD from:
EBCD
Ultimate Boot CD

This one you have to build on your system and you need a Windows XP Home, Pro or MCE CD. Takes a bit of work to set it up but it's not difficult and when you boot it, you have Windows XP:
Ultimate Boot CD for Windows
How to build UBCD4WIN

Thanks for your continued support. I'm now on a short trip and it will be a day or 2 before I'm at the PC again. I must admit I feel this is taking me far into areas where I've never been before, and I'm a bit worried about gong wrong somewhere. So, before I start trying to follow suggestions, can you say whether my DVD drive can be expected to work if I would format the hard disk and reinstall XP from the beginning ? If not, I would be burning all bridges I feel ? Thanks /Kent

No, I can't say your DVD drive will work though I expect if it is bad, it will not allow you to reinstall at all. That's why I suggested using one of the bootable CD options I gave you. It will allow you to check out the DVD drive without Windows being in the picture at all. If it works that way then it should work okay after a reinstall. If it doesn't work then you will need to replace the DVD drive.

OK, some update on my further attempts: - I've tried the safe mode options, but neither the disabling of all statup items or all services had any effect on the issue. - I downloaded the EBCD and burned it to a disc. I wasn't sure whether to indicate to the Nero burner software that I wanted a bootable disc or not. To create a bootable disc I would have needed a Bootable floppy disc according to Nero, and I don't have one. So I burned it as a regular data CD. The surprising thing is that the burner responded to the Nero software and performed as normal on a drive that otherwise won't read anything from any disc.! With the CD in the same drive where it was burned, I pressed F8 during startup, and selected that drive to boot from. After a while that brought up the screen asking if I wanted to do a safe mode start or normal start. The start up of Windows then continued from the C drive. There was no change on the problem itself though. PC refuses to read anything from either CD/DVD drive or from USB card reader. Following this attempt, I removed the CD and re-booted normally. This resulted in a very slow startup, and when I re-booted again it continued to start up very slowly. On a 3rd re-boot, the Windows hard drive inconsistency check started. It said 4 file post segments could not be read, and it reported a file being removed. At the end it reported that damaged files had been restored. PC now starts a little quicker again, but the root problems are still there. Let me know If I'd done anything wrong with the burning please. Remember that as long as my DVD/CD drives can't read files, I have no use for files on e.g. the Windows XP installation disc. Does any of this indicate what hardware might be faulty? The DVD/CD plays music CD's OK via Windows Media Player, and the Nero burning worked, so there seems to be life still in them ?

If you were able to burn a CD using the DVD drive then it's not physically defective and must be a Windows XP problem, though I don't know what the problem is.

Doesn't sound like you burned the CD correctly though. You don't burn the .iso file to CD, you use the .iso file as input and it creates a bootable CD. There is no need for a DOS boot disk. Instead of Nero, give one of these a try. They burn iso files to CD and are easy to use: DeepBurner or ISO Recorder

Might be worth creating the bootable CD and booting it, as a way of verifying the drive is good.

In your last post you said

I have no use for files on e.g. the Windows XP installation disc.

.
You should be able to boot that CD as well. You will get a prompt that says "Press any key to boot from CD".

If that works, you should consider doing a Repair Install, see if that clears up the problem with your DVD and USB devices.

If that does not work, I believe you will have to do a Clean Install.

In any case, before you do anything else, it's time to get your data backed up just in case something happens while working on this problem. You might be able to use Nero to backup your important data since it worked to burn a CD before. If not, you could

1. Remove the hard drive from your computer and mount it in a friends computer as a Slave then copy your data off that way
2. Buy an external USB 2.0 drive enclosure (around $35), remove your drive and put it in there then attach it to a friends computer and copy your data off.
3. Use EBCD, UBCD4WIN or Puppy Linux bootable CD and see if you can copy your data off to CD/DVD.

If it were me, I'd buy the external enclosure and another hard drive the same size or larger than the one you have and then do a full backup using DriveImage XML (free) or Acronis True Image ver 10 (I don't like ver 11). DIXML is included on the UBCD4WIN CD. Acronis comes with a bootable CD so either should work to the USB 2.0 enclosure, if your USB ports are okay. You should be able to check the USB ports with UBCD4WIN, not sure if they will work under EBCD.

Before you do any of this, let me ask some of the other techs here to take a look at your problem and see if they have any ideas.

kgu and Ztruker, A thought. I have had a similar problem with usb card readers in the past. What was happening is that my computer was assigning the same drive letter to the cd/dvd drive and the card reader. With the card reader unplugged and after a clean reboot, is explorer still unable to read your cd/dvd? If you try this and you are able to explorer your dvd I suggest that you are experiencing the same problem I did. I have no clue why the computer "forgot" that it was doubling up assignments but I've see this on three different systems. I solved the problem by mapping the drives so there was no longer a conflict. Ztrucker, I'm sure you know more about this than I.

TomK, that's a new one to me but it makes sense in a weird, Microsoft kind of way. I'm very interested to see kgu's response.

Wow, I have never heard of 2 drives with the same letters, but I have heard of letter assignments being corrupted - perhaps by letter shifting as multicard readers are inserted or removed, perhaps during a write. So I always assign my first optical (usually a CD drive) as Q: and the second optical, the DVD, as V: - it is not likely I will attached a reader that will cause them to shift. I wonder if there is a power issue on the motherboard that perhaps using a self-powered USB hub might fix. A power supply that is barely within tolerance can give some very odd, hard to explain symptoms too. Also, the write cache for removable devices can cause problems so to minimize cache related problems, under My Computer, right click on the Removable Disk, then select Properties > Hardware, then highlight the removable device and select Properties > Policies, then ensure the "Optimize for quick removal" radio button is ticked and then "Ok" your way back out. You still should wait a second or two to ensure any required "housekeeping" is complete, but then you can safely remove/disconnect the stick or other USB device without going through the Safely Remove Hardware icon.