sd card on iMac not working with el capitan

Hope I'm replying to this right. I don't often post in these forums. At any rate, I had trouble with the reader on my iMac and did some net searching. I didn't try any of the resetting or other software/hardware options people posted. I just blew into the SD card slot. The first time I got one card to mount immediately. Then next one didn't work, so I blew hard in the slot again. From then on the other 4 cards I tried worked fine. In the forum where I found this option, some people were blowing compressed air into the slot and also getting decent results. Obviously this solution is unrelated to any software issues/hardware issues, but it's one more easy thing to try. Good luck all.

I'm having the same problem reported on this thread except my computer is MacBook Pro, Late 2010 with 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 Processor.

I've reset the PRAM and SMC several times, but after 10 minutes or so the SD card ejects and the "Improperly Eject Media" warning appears on the screen.

I've recently upgraded my internal hard drive with SSD and replaced the internal super drive with another SSD; so I have two internal SSDs running on my laptop. My main SSD is running OS 10.6 while my second SSD is running OS 10.11.4. When I boot the laptop with OS10.6 the SD card does not eject improperly until I eject it. However, when I boot the laptop with OS 10.11.4 then the SD card would eject during use or non-use without my command. I think this is OS El Capitan issue and not a hardware issue. So, Apple stop the blame game and squash the bug on the current OS 10.11.

BTW, I've done a fresh OS 10.11.4 install on my second SSD and used the Time Machine backup to restore the main SSD.

Watching this thread with a huge amount of interest as my 2009 iMac also has the same SD card issues, I currently have to restart every time I want to import any files which infuriating!

This is clearly a driver/software issue and Apple would rather see us flee to Dell or Surface books than bother fixing it.

I'm grateful to ciclista for working with me, but frankly it's getting beyond what I feel comfortable doing to my machine. But it does seem to confirm that this is NOT a hardware problem.

HELLO APPLE!!!!!! Are you there? Didn't think so....

I am having these same problems and I have a 2012 Mac mini!

Same here, Mac mini (Late 2012) running Mavericks 10.10.5 recently used the RAM to 16gb for photo/video editing.

Now i can't get my imagery off the SD Card (Micro XD U3 64gb via usb card reader).

Have to use a Windows laptop to sync it with a NAS to then load it onto the Mac....not functional.

A restart should bring the SDHC reader back to life.

With 10.11.4, the SDHC reader functions for a few sleep cycles before failing.

If your reader is not working at all, it is much worse than I've had or heard of for this problem.

Don't bother with the PRAM reset or other nonsense, that stuff hasn't helped anything in years. IMHO.

Also, don't leave a card in the reader when it is put to sleep. I don't trust it, can't prove it is bad. But I've had strange things happen.

Let's hope 10.11.5 comes out with a better fix. 10.11.1 to 10.11.3 did nothing to fix El Capitan.

El Capitan was worth all I paid for it. Nothing.

Apple gets no money from me until it is fixed. After is becoming dubious. Those Surface computers look nice.

Good luck. We all need it.

After my hopes were raised by improved SDHC operation with 10.11.4, I have sad news.

Now, my SDHC card (tried two) will be self "ejected' by El Capitan after a few minutes on a clean cold boot.

So, whatever 10.11.4 did right is now un-did.

How did this stop working? I now see what you may be fighting.

Here is what I have updated since 10.11.4

• iTunes 12.3.3.17
• Microsoft OneNote 15.21
• Microsoft OneNote 15.21.1
• Digital Camera Raw 6.19
• iMovie 10.1.2

During that time I also had a Time Capsule issue and a Google Drive issue to address.

I don't see how any this could have broken SDHC operation.

But something did. I have to start testing out SDHC before and after every software update now.

I recently upgraded to el Capitan (corporate laptop) and about a week later, the SD slot stopped working (Macbook Air 13" mid 2012). Verified card is fine by putting the card in my wife's MBA and it works.

Looking through this thread, its obvious this has been an issue for months. Apple, where are you?

Indeed. WHERE IS APPLE?

Apparently this doesn't affect enough people to rise to whatever threshold. I've reported it to the developers via Bug Report and got a "that's interesting" in response. Perhaps some of you could remind us of how to report a bug in the conventional manner. And then ALL of us need to report this.

It is NOT a hardware issue!!!!

The problem was introduced in 10.11 on 9/30/15 as I recall.

Not fixed in 10.11.1, 10.11.2, 10.11.3.

El Capitan 10.11.4 around 03/21/16 seemed to have improved reliability of using SDHC cards, but as noted above, this recently "self-terminated" on my computer.

Extrapolating, my guess is that 10.12 will solve the problem.

The world is an imperfect place. I think John Bender said it in "The Breakfast Club".

I was having the same problem and tried a bunch of fixes suggested on this thread with nothing working. The card reader was not appearing when I inserted a memory card, there was "no internal card reader" under my system report and I could only see the card via the disk utility app but still not mount the card.

Saw this on another thread and it worked straight away, download and install the driver found at this page:

http://www.acs.com.hk/en/driver/4/acr38-smart-card-reader/

My card is now reading the exact same SDHC card that it would not read 5 minutes ago. Hope it works for you!

It sadly did NOT work. But I'm glad it helped you!

HEY APPLE!!!! You listening???

I had the same problem and found a wonderful solution here:

I'll quote the important part:

Turns out this is not a software problem, but a hardware problem. There is a small switch inside the card reader that signals to the computer that a card has been inserted. This switch can get stuck.The solution is to insert a toothpick or other non-conductive “stick” into the SD card slot to free up the switch. According to posts on the Apple site, the switch is located at the top/back of the card slot.

I tried this and it worked on my iMac late 2009. Bazinga!

Disclaimer: I haven't read all the posts in this thread, so I hope this has not been posted before.

Thanks DrToz

I'm using a transcend Jetdrive (128gb) as an additional document store in my SD card slot... Running El Capitan 10.11.5 on a McBook Air (13, Mid2012) with all the problems everyone else was having... downloaded and installed the "PC/SD Driver Installer" (18-Feb-2016, Version 1.1.2, Mac version of course) Rebooted with the SD Card removed...

• Did a System Report and the Card Reader was visible again (no need for a NVRAM reboot, hooray!)
• Inserted the SD card - mounted without issue...
• Read/Write to a few documents for a while, no disappearance...
• then for the real kicker... I put the MacBook Air to sleep... No issues...

3 days later, and at least 20 sleep cycles later and still no disappearing acts!

*fingers crossed* this stays like this... and when apple does another system update - they don't break this as a result...

-drew