Broken Card reader support in 10.5...

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Andy Hewitt - 13 May 2008 22:29 GMT

I've spent the night fighting with trying to get my media card readers
to work. I have a Trust one, a 7dayshop one, and a new one I just got
off eBay cheap. Not one of them will connect reliably to my G5, and it
doesn't matter what port I use, either on a hub, or a built-in port. The
reader is recognised in Profiler, but they just will not work reliably
when a card is inserted.

Two of them fail part way through a download, so I can get the images by
continually reconnecting the reader. One just refuses altogether,
although it will appear on the desktop, and launches iPhoto, but then
pops up a message about being disconnected. Subsequent reconnects just
don't work at all.

The same cards can be connected and read perfectly when I use the
cameras directly.

Oh, and the same card readers work fine in 10.4 on an old Sawtooth.

Looking on the Apple forums reveals that I'm not alone, something was
broke in 10.5 at some point.

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Andy Hewitt
<http://web.mac.com/andrewhewitt1/>

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David Empson - 16 May 2008 13:03 GMT

> I've spent the night fighting with trying to get my media card readers
> to work. I have a Trust one, a 7dayshop one, and a new one I just got
[quoted text clipped - 8 lines]
> pops up a message about being disconnected. Subsequent reconnects just
> don't work at all.

Interesting. I've noticed a similar problem with one of my card readers
(an Olympus xD Memory Adapter, model MAUSB-200 - plug an xD card into
the side of something resembling a USB flash drive "stick").

What I observed was a horrible performance hit and/or errors when trying
to copy some files off the 512 MB xD card, while others were OK. It
seemed like it was only able to reliably access part of the memory on
the card.

My other "Silicon Power" multi-card reader works fine, and the Olympus
one used to work, so I assumed that something had gone wrong with the
Olympus one.

The symptoms didn't make sense - the xD card's interface must use a
serial protocol because there aren't enough pins to supply an address to
it in parallel, and the successfully copied files were fine, so how
could a hardware fault with the card reader have difficulty with some
portion of the card's address space?

> The same cards can be connected and read perfectly when I use the
> cameras directly.
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
> Looking on the Apple forums reveals that I'm not alone, something was
> broke in 10.5 at some point.

Upon further reflection and thanks to your clue I realise that I would
have used the Olympus previously under Tiger and that was probably the
first time I used it under Leopard.

A bug in Leopard's USB Mass Storage Device driver makes a lot more
sense. I'll have to retest this card reader on my PowerMac G4 running
Tiger for confirmation.

I'll do some more tests.

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David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz

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Andy Hewitt - 16 May 2008 13:39 GMT

> Interesting. I've noticed a similar problem with one of my card readers
> (an Olympus xD Memory Adapter, model MAUSB-200 - plug an xD card into
[quoted text clipped - 14 lines]
> could a hardware fault with the card reader have difficulty with some
> portion of the card's address space?

Now you mention it, xD cards are worse, although I've also had trouble
with a Sony Stick too. My CF cards from my Olympus E510 seem better
though.

> > The same cards can be connected and read perfectly when I use the
> > cameras directly.
[quoted text clipped - 13 lines]
>
> I'll do some more tests.

It's a strange one, I've now plugged in an old Trust reader I have, and
had trouble with using in Tiger, and that seems to work fine in Leopard.

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Andy Hewitt
<http://web.mac.com/andrewhewitt1/>

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Mac Forum / Country Specific / UK Mac Group / May 2008

Broken Card reader support in 10.5...