Thinkpads Forum

Hi Everyone,
Just dropping a note about following issue and solution found:

Equipment: T520 i7-2860QM 16GB Win10 Pro 64bit update 21H1
I just noticed the SD card reader was no longer detecting SD cards... I had not used it for a while, so probably went south after some update.

Ruled out the following:
- SD card malfunction since working on another machine
- Driver issue, tried to reinstall drivers from lenovo to no avail
- Indeed, Device Manger did not display anything like RICOH SD device under Disk Drives or Storage Controllers or IDE/ATA...

Solution found:
- Reboot / press F1 or blue button to access Boot Menu ("Thinkpad Setup" they call it)
- select SECURITY then I/O PORT ACCESS
- then I disabled all unused ports (like Wimax, WAN etc) and I disabled the MEMORY CARD SLOT
- Exit and saved, restart computer
- Then reboot again machine, go SECURITY then I/O PORT ACCESS then enable back MEMORY CARD SLOT, then save/exit reboot.

It then worked, showing in logs that the card slot was found and driver installed.
Good luck, hope it can be useful to anyone blocked on this
Stéphane

Thank you for sharing and welcome to the forum!

The card reader on this generation of laptops has a few "quirks", so to speak. Depending on how/which operating system is booted, it may display different PCI IDs, which require different drivers. If you have the 'wrong' driver installed, it won't be detected properly (will be shown as 'unknown device').

Also, when it goes into low-power state it tends to disappear off the bus. Supposedly, it wakes up automatically, when the card is inserted, but I wouldn't be surprised if sometimes it just doesn't work, and requires a full reset of the port, which is probably what you achieved by that procedure of yours.

I just registered to say THANK YOU!
I've been struggling all day with reinstalling Windows 10 on my T420, installing every version of the drivers I could find without success. The device didn't give any error messages, but it simply wasn't recognized as an SD card reader and wouldn't accept the drivers. Of course, the cards weren't recognized either.
It recognized it in Linux as an SD/MMC reader, but when I inserted any card, it gave access errors.
I followed your method of disabling it in BIOS, turning the laptop off and on, re-enabling it in BIOS, and voilà!
Working perfectly!