OT (Windows): SD Card reader on Gateway Laptop

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 09:56:07PM -0500, Paul King wrote:
> This is labelled off-topic, since this is a Windows question, and I need
> some help. My Gateway laptop, about 1.5 years old, a wireless
> tablet/notebook combo, has a slot for an SD card at the front of the
> unit. While it doesn't work in Linux, it also doesn't work in Windows. I
> thought that Windows would auto-detect the device, but it does not.
> 
> There is no bios setting for this, and the forums I've visited have
> stated that there was a problem, but I had no satisfactory answer as of
> yet. OTOH, there is plenty of stuff regarding Linux which I am going to
> try out, which is why I am not asking about Linux.
> 
> If anyone knows anything about these Gateway laptops and had dealt with
> the issue, please reply if you can. Thanks.

A number of laptops in the past used a texas instruments based PCI
device for memory cards on laptops.

If you have linux you should see it in the PCI device listing (lspci)
although it probably won't work.  Someone has been working on reverse
engineering it though so it might even work someday.

As for windows, well maybe you don't have the driver installed.  or
maybe you are using a card it doesn't like.  The one on my wife's
previous compaq laptop only supported up to 512MB cards.  1GB and higher
simply gave strange errors and weird behaviour if it did anything at
all.  Apparently some card readers were designed with the assumption
that the block size would always be 512bytes or something like that, and
1GB and higher need to use a larger block size.

Of course SDHC is different again and only devices designed to support
SDHC can use 4GB and higher cards.  Plain SD is 2GB and less only, and
hence the largest most devices can handle (unless they ignored part of
the spec and got stuck at 512MB).

--
Len Sorensen
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