SD Card Slot Disappears After Sleep (Gone Until Reboot)

I've got the same problem. The internal card reader doesn't open when I insert an SD card. I checked the "About this Mac" and got this message, This computer doesn't contain any Apple Internal Memory Card Readers. And I couldn't get it to read from a USB card reader. Have you resolved this issue since you posted it ? I'll get it back when I do a Reset the System Management Controller (SMC0:I shut the machine down, unplug it for 15 seconds and then plug it back in, and restart. I then have my internal card reader again, until the Mac goes to sleep or I put it to sleep. Then when I awaken the machine, the card reader is gone again.

Before sleep/hibernate Windows should preserve the device state. After Wake, it should re-probe all devices, notify the user of any changes in the devices or their state to the user. For example, you can replace the SD card before the computer is Awake, and notify the user of any changes. Events reported to the Windows kernel get lost/ignored causing problems.

Rather than ask users to mediate between MS and Apple, someone from Apple should pick up the phone. MS have wholeheartedly adopted a continual update model now, I'm sure this could be fixed with some communication. These posts aren't going to stop coming in, that should be very clear at this point!

I feel a bit better when I saw this thread knowing that I am not the only one who has this problem. But instead of SD card disappearing time to time , I also suffer from other problems caused by it I believe. when the card reader is not recognized , and i press the 'option' button to switch between Win and Mac , it takes 90~120 seconds to show the boot selection screen. And the touch pad and key board lagged a lot ! I only saw people here complaining the SD card recognition problem. does it mean that none you you guys ever experienced the issues i have ?

I'am using 2015 MBP ,128G, 4G,retina .

No sorry I don't see that behaviour at all.

BUT: since a raft of windows updates I installed today, behaviour has changed. Instead of silently failing, when I resume from sleep I often get this:

1) under Universal Seraial Bus Contollers in Device Manager, we have an atserisked 'Unknown USB Device (Port Rest Failed)' - that sounds like progress, right. Something has tried to reset the port at least, rather than silently failing.

2)A popup says "USB device Not recognised - The last USB device you connected to this computer malfuntioned and Windows does not recognise it. Recommendation: Try reconnecting the device. If Windows still does not recognise it, your device may not be working properly."

I agree, my device (sd card slot driver) is likely not working properly.....

Also now it seem the card slot disappearing can now persist over reboots, only a shutdown or reboot to osx will make it come back.

towoode wrote:

No sorry I don't see that behaviour at all.

BUT: since a raft of windows updates I installed today, behaviour has changed. Instead of silently failing, when I resume from sleep I often get this:

1) under Universal Seraial Bus Contollers in Device Manager, we have an atserisked 'Unknown USB Device (Port Rest Failed)' - that sounds like progress, right. Something has tried to reset the port at least, rather than silently failing.

2)A popup says "USB device Not recognised - The last USB device you connected to this computer malfuntioned and Windows does not recognise it. Recommendation: Try reconnecting the device. If Windows still does not recognise it, your device may not be working properly."

I agree, my device (sd card slot driver) is likely not working properly.....

Also now it seem the card slot disappearing can now persist over reboots, only a shutdown or reboot to osx will make it come back.

I get exactly the same behavior, except even a reboot to OSX doesn't bring it back.

Hello,

I have the same problem with El Capitan, MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2013).

The SD Card is visible after reboot, vanishes after returning from Sleep.

Even if I pop it out and reinsert, the SD is not visible, nor mounted.

Any suggestions?

Seba

Sorry Evan I previously said I don't see that behaviour, but I see similar: in fact I've found that the presence of an SD card with a lot of files on most often makes an alt-boot never do anything but display a black screen. Take the SD card out, no problem. I believe that the mac is somehow trying to scan the files on the card, because I also have the behaviour that my mac corrupts zip files on any sd card i insert over time. I suspect this is related to me booting between osx and windows because the corruption only seems to occur when i boot to windows.

Just to add another voice to the list of people this is affecting. I understand why people are saying that this could be with either MS or Apple I am firmly under the impression that this is to do with the drivers, as such this rests with Apple who provide these drivers. A couple of extra details of the behaviours I've seen are:

- Once the SD card has been 'lost' then a restart doesn't work - apparently the restart doesn't actually power down the SD card so it doesn't recover.

- Conversely - hibernating does recover the card - hibernation does result in a full power-down.

- Occasionally, though not predictably, the slot will recover around 2 minutes after waking (not found any pattern for this)

As such the hibernate option appears to be the fastest way to recover - but it's not an acceptable workaround.

Problem is due to the MacBook not to remount the SD card upon wakeup. I'm using Transcend Jetdrive Lite, they have a Toolbox you can install the application, selecting Jetdrive lite, turn on or off the auto-wake up option. Problem resolved on my MBA by selecting "Off". I believed it should work for other SD card as well.

http://www.transcend-info.com/Support/Software-181/

To everyone who is having this issue:

I started having is problem the day I got my MacBook Pro. I installed windows and sure enough, the sd card would disappear. This, of course, frustrated me but I was positive it was a driver issue of some kind. I looked it up and it seemed as if a lot of people were having the same issue. I thought "There's no way is a hardware issue, so many people have the same problem." So I let it be.

About two months later I started using windows on my mac again and the whole sd card issue came up again. Then I thought "What bad would it do to take my mac in to see if it was a hardware issue." So I did. And sure enough, it was a hardware issue. There is a chip inside the mac that controls the sd card reader and I guess apple's chip isn't that good. Turns out mine was faulty from the time I bought it.

I had a warranty on my mac so it was no big deal apart from the fact that I had gone on months thinking my mac was fine.

If anyone still has this issue and still has a warranty, take your mac in. It's not a driver issue. Your mac is faulty or broken. Don't be like me and believe everything you read on the internet.

Indeed after the Sierra firmware update, we are now back to the original situation that the card slot disappears after sleep. The vendor ID on my card reader says it is an apple device so I don't understand why posters here have discussed other vendors?

I updated my bug post with apple, and once again requested a response. It has now been 6 months with no response

The Broadcom driver is a SCSI driver, unlike the Apple version. It has been stable from day 1. Hibernate probes hardware and rebuilds the hardware tables again. There is a downside to Hibernate, which can result in duplicate instances of the same hardware, so it would be wise to test and verify.

My 2013 (6,2) MacBook Air 8gb, 500gb SSD behaves this way: My SD card does get restored properly from 'hibernate' but never from 'sleep' mode. And since I have to hit the power button to wake it up from hibernate I find that simply having it do a shutdown works for me. It takes about 10 seconds to wake from hibernate. It takes about 15 seconds to boot from a shutdown.

I would rather be using Sleep mode if it worked. It wakes the computer in around 5-7 seconds - albeit without the SD drive. In fact I used Sleep mode routinely when I wasn't as dependent on the contents of my 512gb SD card. But these days the SD card is fundamental to many of the tasks I perform.

It would be splendid if Apple could evolve an SD driver for Bootcamp that would find, wake and restore the SD card during wake-up from sleep mode. This would seem doable - but only if someone at Apple cares about those of us who want or need to run Windows on our Apple hardware. Personally, I wouldn't even own this MacBook Air if not for the Bootcamp capability. I typically only boot to Siera OS so I can backup (using WinClone) my Windows 10 partition image.

I would LOVE to be proved wrong but Apple would have to be in a fairly benevolent mode to fix this for us.

I have this problem intermittently on my MacBook Pro (2015). The SD card will sometimes be gone on wake from sleep, with a notification that it wasn't properly unmounted. I can get it to reappear by restarting.

I only use the SD card for Time Machine backups, and one thing I've noticed is that if I remember to check that there's no TM activity before sleeping, the SD card returns on wake. It's only when I forget to check that I sometimes get the problem.

I'm wondering, therefore, if the disappearance of the SD card is caused by read/write activity being interrupted by sleep. If so, disabling background activity on the SD card (Spotlight indexing, backups, virus checks, etc) might be a fix.