[SOLVED] SD card detected by Ubuntu but not by Windows.

[ddmcpherson]

Hi Hard Toms,

I have an issue with working with SD cards on my ThinkPad T550.

The laptop has a built-in SD card reader. Windows 10 absolutely does not detect the SD cards, not in the Partition Manager, not with diskpart. In the Device Manager, I don't even find anything that looks like the SD card reader (the "Controller for Windows storage spaces" perhaps?).

The hardware does not seem to be the problem as I can boot Ubuntu on the laptop and access the SD card that way. This puzzles me. I haven't found anyone else for whom that was the case.

Any tips on how to get back SD card reader functionality on Windows? Hardware clearly isn't the problem.

Thanks!

 

[dwd999]

How was the SD card formatted? If you can read it under linux then its probably formatted in some variation normally used in linux. Usually windows will refuse to read a device in linux format and give you an error message recommending you let windows reformat it (which you don't want to do since it means losing your files). But it sounds like you're not even getting that error message. Option 1 would be to try a windows based linux reader to try to access the files from windows like:

Freeware Linux Reader™ for Windows

Need to access files on Linux? Easy! Here is a freeware tool for extracting files from Ext2/Ext3/Ext4, HFS and ReiserFS partitions in Windows.

www.diskinternals.com

If that doesn't work, you'll have to choose between reformatting the card or continuing to temporarily boot up in linux. Reformatting would most likely mean using something like Gparted to remove all of the formatting info and cleaning it that way. Then you could format it as msdos or ntfs which windows would recognize. But you'll have to determine if all of the other devices you have will also read that format.