Internal Card Reader Not Detected

December 10, 2006 12:30 PM

My internal card reader has suddenly vanished from My Computer. Help!

I bought a Dell XPS600 with one fitted as an option. It's worked flawlessly until about a week ago when I noticed that the drives were not showing up in My Computer.

If I insert a card into the reader the green light on the front comes on, but it isn't detected by the PC.

I've tried using the Add New Hardware wizard but that didn't find it, and I've opened up the case and checked the connections - all fine.

I'm outta ideas. Anyone care to help while I wait for Dell to get back to me?

posted by lemonfridge to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Those card readers are really shady. I've had them break on laptops, printers, etc.

I think that what happened with mine is that is that I may have pulled one out too quickly or something...
posted by k8t at 1:38 PM on December 10, 2006

A friend of mine had a similar problem. In her case, she had mapped a network drive to the first drive letter after her hard drive and CD drive. Windows tried to assign the card reader to the same drive letter as the networked drive and so it wouldn't show up. So make sure the first drive letter after your CD-ROM drive is available.
posted by hootch at 2:06 PM on December 10, 2006

This happens on my desktop (Dell Dimension 9100), and it seems to be that the plug comes loose. I've taken off the cover and replugged the reader a couple of times, which fixes it, but then it comes lose again. I've given up and just use the USB cable that came with the camera.
posted by LeisureGuy at 2:18 PM on December 10, 2006

The first thing to do is to uninstall from device manager, reboot, and let windows detect and re-install the device. If it doesn't work, there's a very good chance it's a hardware issue, such as a loose connection.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 9:00 AM on December 11, 2006