Hey guys!
I am running Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS on my Dell XPS 9310 2-in-1. Honestly Linux runs amazing on this as a daily driver for this machine. However, I cannot seem to use my internal SD card reader at all. It works on Windows 10 on this machine and I have tested this card and am able to see it when using an external dongle. If it is a driver issue by chance, where would I start with addressing this?
Sounds like an old bug one of my machines used to have. It’s either completely unsupported (unlikely but possible) or there is a quirk that most fixes will be antiquated and forgot by now for being for ancient Ubuntu versions.
Here is the “hacky” [read: stupid] way. Put an SD card in the reader…reboot. Does it work? Enjoy…lame I know but as I said I had an SD reader like this and the ONLY way it worked was if there was a card in it at boot time. Otherwise it would never be initialized. There were at the time some stupid insane boot params you could pass that worked for like a week until an update changed things and poof, no more…
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Yo, I left it in the reader for an hour and it just found it. I don’t plan on taking it out that often so I guess I’m good. lol. Thank you for replying!
Does dmesg show anything around the time it “found it?” Good it’s working, not soo good it takes an hour haha. That’s worse than having to have the card in at boot time.
Have you tried more than one SD card? Kinda wondering if maybe there is an issue with the card or it’s FS causing the huge delay. On top of checking dmesg I’d also check the card while it’s seen to make sure everything checks out. Might be something Windows ignores but Linux sits and waits on.
Machine is on fire:
Windows…this is fine, it’s a feature!
Linux…perhaps deal with this…indeed I’m not doing squat until this is dealt with.
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Have you tried to run an lsusb to see if it shows up? It should, even if it’s an unsupported out of the box or through the automatic drivers installed by Ubuntu.
That, at least, should clear up what’s the device and if it needs some kind of driver to run on Linux.
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No so the issue ended up being, that I had the secure boot from sd card option enabled in the bios and forgot to disable it. Once I turned it off it recognizes the card immediately every time. Not sure exactly why it would cuz the specific issue still
Interestingly enough, when I ran that I was not able to see the card at all till it just “appeared”. Disabling sd cards as a boot option did solve the problem but kinda stupid if I ever wanna duel boot off the card in the future
Sadly that’s a normal “gotcha” these days. There are so many logical flow charts on how things work when it comes to this stuff like audio signal paths but the manufacturers never really tell you this stuff. You buy and find out the hard way. How a lot of boards now have PCIe lane breakdowns is a step forward but it’s kinda pissing in the ocean heh.
At least you got things working and / or you’ll have to dual off a flash drive 
So long as USB boot isn’t lumped in with the SD in the BIOS.
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What made it appear? Was you disabling it as a boot option that did it? That’s really strange.
Yep! When I disabled SD cards as a boot option it worked just fine.
Sounds like Linux is ditching the device all together if it’s not able to boot from it. If you never had issues like these in Windows, I’d say that’s the issue. Maybe there’s a way to change this behaviour, but I don’t really know where to start. I’ve ever only had one laptop with Linux on, my current laptop, and the SD card reader works better than it used to in Windows.
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The possible reasons for card reader not working are: **The reader is incompatible with your operating system or memory card.
Way to read…low key troll?