sd card on iMac not working with el capitan

It looks like HELL Capitan is still causing problems with SD cards. Mine was okay until i went to save something then i got the dreaded " you didn't eject the sd card properly, which is the pre curser to "your sd card is not going to work anymore mate!! **** sd cards. As far as Apple appears to be concerned they may as well be encrypted!!! as there appears to be no acknowledgement of our problems. Well certainly not on this forum.

Looks like Apple did indeed release a "False Flash Fix".

My SDHC card no longer mounts. I was going to test reading and writing to card as other have reported the disk ejected issue.

What is wrong at Apple?

I won't be buying any Apple until this is fixed.

At this point I don't think that Apple will never solve this problem. So I continue with the trick I used and that has been very successful, that is to clear the AppleStorageDrivers.kext file. I'm pretty sure it's a matter of plugins. I do not know how or why, but it works for me, and my cards are no longer expelled.

This problem obviously got some attention for it to have been partially fixed in 10.11.4, unless the improvement was happenstance.

I've had nothing but Apple Computers since the MacPlus and this is the first really major disappointment in over 30 years of using their products. Years ago I started a log of every update I perform to trace problem causes, but while I still do it, the software has gotten so good over time, there were no problems. Until El Capitan.

I see no compelling reason to update my main computer, a 2009 iMac 27", I was in an Apple Store last week. The new versions have prettier screens, more cores, and are thinner. After seven years, that is it. I had an iPad, sold after I got my iPhone 6. See no compelling reason for the iWatch, newer iPads, or anything there. The best application I use turns out to be One Note from Microsoft, and it runs everywhere I go on everything I use. No sync problems ever. I gave up on Notes when the sync between my iPhone and my Mac when south. Couldn't fix it, never looked back.

I did look at the AppleStorageDrivers.kext bundle. El Capitan also came with some really irritating problems with my USB devices, including my Apple Keyboard and Mouse. I can't help but wonder if the problem is USB and the card reader is just a victim. Not that it matters.

I use Windows 7 computers at work and it used to be nice to come home to OS X. No longer. I use and wait for my keyboard to become unresponsive, my SDHC cards to not work, and other weirdness. My options remain open when it becomes time to get a new computer. If Apple comes through, I'll happily stay with them. My expectations are low after this.

The best I can report on the SDHC issue is, I can use the card for a few sleep cycles over a few days before it goes south.

It is one thing to have problems in new features, it is another to break what once worked well. That speaks of poor development practices, poor regression testing, or lack of concern over issues found.

Very well said. I have now gone back to Yosemite. I see no reason to keep reporting the issues to this forum we have all found as well as the work arounds we have done when we cannot get even the slightest acknowledgement from Apple that our efforts are being recognised or worst still that they even acknowledge there is a problem. I find it the worst customer service i have ever encountered. So for me its back to Yosemite and if that fails i will run Windows on my Mac and tell the whole world why. My wife has been running Windows 10 on her lap top since its inception. The whole process of upgrading from Windows Vista went flawlessly and she has had no problem since. When i discuss my issues with my colleagues they are adamant they will not be getting a Mac anytime soon. This is a crying shame as Apple was once thought of as the Rolls Royce of computers and i was willing to defend it to anybody who would listen but for me it is now fast becoming a Skoda, and nobody likes to be forced to drive a car they don't like, now do they.

Drastic measure indeed. I have a Time Capsule and could restore to Yosemite without much ado.

However, I hesitate for the loss of security updates.

I tried to rely on my Windows 10 Bootcamp installation for a time, but it has driver issues, sleeps less well than under OS X, and just runs a bit sluggishly.

I also tried to rely on my Chromebook Pixel, but the Word and Excel apps are just not good enough for real documents and large spreadsheets.

The most compelling product out there right now is the Surface, but I have no need for another computer.

So, I am going to continue to complain and hope Apple cares enough to fix it, eventually.

Yesterday I updated my carry around SDHC card with a new copy of my Photos library with no problems. Of course the card will not mount this morning. I'll shutdown the computer tonight after less than 3 days uptime. This actually reminds me of the old days with 68K based Macs which had serious stability issues. What is old is new again.

I use RHEL at work (under a VM under Windows 7). OS X still beats Linux. I tried an Ubuntu partition once, seemed a throwback.

The money is in iOS and OS X is deep on the back burner at Cupertino.

OS X is also showing its age. It has been dumbed down because pretty beats functional at Apple.

I was able to make OS X useable with some help from:

https://github.com/herrbischoff/awesome-osx-command-line

Setting the scroll bars to always visible has made the Finder almost useful. Lots of other settings that make OS X tolerable. Check it out.

See also:

http://docs.hardentheworld.org/OS/OSX_10.11_El_Capitan/

My SD card worked yesterday and today after finally upgrading to El Capitan it doesn't work. I too have a late 2009 iMac. I am so sad. I never wanted to upgrade but my bank and other encrypted websites no longer worked stating that Safari was not updated enough. I had the latest version short of El Capitan.

How can I report this to Apple? I got up an hour early to get through crap on my desk starting with Easter photo download and here I am, hour gone and no way to access the photos.

Welcome to the club 😟.

As a TEMPORARY measure you could use an external reader, assuming your USB ports still work, or even the camera that takes the card, again connected to the USB.

HEY APPLE!!! ARE YOU LISTENING???????

I didn't think so.

Generally, rebooting has offered temporary relief from this El Capitan caused bug.

The problem appears when the computer sleeps.

Update 10.11.4 improved the situation, for most it allows cards to work through several sleep cycles.

One would have thought that our problem reports right here would be enough, and maybe they were.

You could take it to the "Genius" bar and see what they do, but don't expect much and these big iMacs are a bit much to drag around.

If your SDHC reader is not working at all, you have a different problem, mine always worked on boot, died after sleep with El Capitan.

I highly recommend using Google Chrome. It self updates and has a number of good security features. I was once a Safari fan, but after a few user interface tweaks, I started to hate it, moved to Chrome, and never looked back.

Another great product I like is One Note. The El Capitan update was supposed to add some neat features to Notes, I tried them and looked for an alternative from the App Store, never looked back. One Note works on my iPhone, iMac, Chromebook, and under windows. The iPhone version has a few issues with editing that annoy me.

If someone suggests resetting PRAM or such, don't bother, it works just as well as a simple restart.

Good luck.

Wendy, as others have said this appears to be a problem when the computer goes to sleep. That is that when it wakes up it forgets about the sd card card and so it no longer appears(well that is the simplest explanation). So the first thing to do is go into System Preferences and click on the energy saver icon. Now move all the sliders to the right. Close the settings down and reboot your pc. Now having done this you should be able to see the sd card again and now you should not lose it again as your computer will not go to sleep. On you have finished with the sd card you can remove the card and change your energy saving settings back to the where they were. If this does not work you can try the other suggestions of using a usb card reader or leaving the sd card in the camera and transferring the photos from there using the usb cable. Or if the camera as wifi you could transfer the photos to your phone or iPad and then to the pc. Very messy i know but these are hard times Apple is giving us at the moment. If you want to give them some back you could ask them to take you back to Yosemite or whatever operating system you was on previously a you know your sd cards worked there. On they have done that for you you can down load a browser such as Firefox or Opera to see if they work with your bank or institution which doesn't like the old Safari. This i have done in the past with great success. You can then keep checking in on this forum to see if things have been fixed as i can assure you, you won't be getting a letter or email from Apple anytime soon.

I have just noticed that Mandy_S has just announced a whole range of perks for using this and other forums. Can i suggest Mandy (assuming your or one of your people are watching these posts) that people don't want perks, they want fixes to their problems. As a starting point it would be simply magnificent if a forum manager or one of her/his assistants would actually acknowledge there is an issue and has being being looked into. Once this is done this should then be followed up with regular updates. This is how customer service should work. This would avoid a lot of angst for a lot of people. I for one would love to tell Wendy that Apple are looking into her problem and that an update should be appearing shortly. We should be receiving updates via the app store as a surprise for something we have put forward. Now i don't mind helping Wendy or any other person who is stuck as i myself have gained lots of knowledge from using these and many other forums. So please have a re-think about how you are handling these forums.

Hi there gui278,

I would like to try the removal of the CardReader.kext but before doing so, could you please post me the result of USB Prober? I would like to understand which is the driver that matches the Card Reader in this case.

Since my trick I posted some time ago did not last for too much, I have decided to buy an external SD Card Reader, which is working perfectly.

What I have seen so far is that the external Card Reader is matched by the IOUSBMassStorageInterfaceNub driver in the IOUSBMassStorage.kext

while the SD Card Reader has its own driver, AppleUSBCardReader, which is called instead

Now, I wonder what happens if you just delete the kext, so basically which driver will be loaded instead of the default one.

Thanks

Luca

Well,

just after the last upgrade, I completely lost the internal SD Card Reader. Rebooting would have no effect at all this time and the error I saw in the log was quite deceiving:

Apr 2 12:23:49 Lucas-iMac kernel[0]: 003629.285005 PRT5@26500000: AppleUSBHostPort::disconnect: persistent enumeration failures

So I decided to follow the advice of gui278 and removed the AppleUSBCardReader.kext driver. Actually this trick worked immediately! Now my SD card is seen as the following:

as you can see, the driver is now the AppleUSBStorageCoexistentDriver within the MassStorageDriver which is responsible for all the external USB devices attached to any of the Mac Ports.

The only issue is that the SD icon is no longer present (a generic HD Icon is) and actually I haven't quite understood how to use the Personalities in the .plist file - for the time being, I am happy anyway: MY INTERNAL SD CARD READER IS BACK !!!!!

Thanks gui278!

Luca

I spoke too early. The SD came back but once I remove it, and insert it again, the Mac does not recognize it any longer.

It's a driver issue anyway, for sure.

I've been tripped up by the illusion of success only to find issues after sleep or re-insertion of a card.

I finally looked into the /System/Library/Extensions folder to see what was going on and I looked into the contents with TimeMachine under Yosemite.

At first, I just looked at the folder level for IOUSB* and it looked like nothing has changed since the initial release. Then I looked deeper.

The IOUSB* extensions depth was doubled from two packages to four.

1. Before El Capitan, files dated 19 Sept 2014 (did not restore these files to examine contents)
   1. IOUSBFamily.ktext
   2. IOUSBMassStorageClass.ktext
2. After El Capitan, all ktext files dated still 16 Sept 2015 even after 10.11.4. Examining the package contents reveals:
   1. IOUSBFamily.ktext
      1. MacOS/IOUSBFamily and _CodeSignature/CodeResources, updated March 12
      2. Info.plist and version.plist from February
      3. Plugins unchanged from Sept-2015
      4. Resources updated March, except English
   2. IOUSBHostFamily.ktext
      1. MacOS/IOUSBHostFamily and _CodeSignature/CodeResources, updated March 12
      2. Info.plist and version.plist from February
      3. Plugins unchanged from Sept-2015
   3. IOUSBMassStorageClass.ktext
      1. Info.plist and version.plist from February
      2. MacOS/IOUSBMassStorageClass and _CodeSignature/CodeResources updated March 12
   4. IOUSBMassStorageDriver.ktext
      1. Info.plist and version.plist from February
      2. MacOS/IOUSBMassStorageDriver and CodeResources updated March12

So, El Capitan 10.11.4 did introduce significant changes in the drivers. Since the behavior improved, this is no surprise.

I still expect more changes in 10.11.5 and more improvement.

While many of us with the problem are using "older" Macs that still run the latest software, I don't feel guilty at all for complaining. The latest iMacs look hardly different from my 2009 model. Apple has traditionally allowed users to keep current for a long time (ignoring radical 68K to PowerPC and PowerPC to Intel transitions). I see little reason to update right now. I do video compression once a week and can wait a bit for it to complete.

Somebody provided this link, and am still looking it over. Lots of details I've cared about before.

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/306777-guide-usb-fix-el-capitan-1011/