Hello everyone! As the title says I'm facing a weird issue with my notebook: the SD card reader built into it is acting really weird. I can only read SD cards, even if they're not locked. I tried to install new drivers from Realtek (the reader is made by Realtek) on top of the old ones but nothing changed. I've had this issue before but I could fix it just unmounting and remounting the SD card. Now looks like this trick isn't working anymore. The specs and model of my notebook are in my profile, if you need those. The card reader model is Realtek RTS5229. Thanks.
Is it only this SD card or does it happen with any SD card?
Because I had my 64 Gigabyte microSD card that started being read-only.
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ive had the LOCK slide thing not stay put where it would enter read only when being inserted but will slide back into write when pulling it back out.
Maybe try a peice of tape on the readonly slide?
It may be that the write protect pins in the SD Card slot got bent/broken and are no longer making contact. Pins 12 and 13 in the diagram.
See this, its the tuning fork like pins
When they make contact it closes a circuit and allows you to write to the card. When they are open (such as when broken) your card becomes read only.
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@Garfield Yes, any SD card I throw in
@Dje4321 I've tested multiple SD cards and adapters but had no luck so it's not the switch on the card itself
@catsay I tested different cards but had no luck
That would be a symptom of your card reader slot being damaged then.
Fixing it would require the laptop to be taken apart.
To be honest I'm leaning more towards an OS issue. I've seen many cases online but none of them was helpful to me or safe enough for my taste. I should give a go to a live Linux distro maybe?
Unfortunately I can't with a VM because it's a PCI express reader so would require a lot of hassle to pass that.
Have you tried a live USB stick?
Yeah give a liveUSB a try. Just as a last check, can see in dmesg if sdcards are being loaded as read-only.
If you're going with debian based, might need to apt-get install linux-firmware-nonfree for the RTS 5229 driver.
If that doesn't automatically work might need to add mmc_block, rtsx_pci, rtsx_pci_sdmmc into /etc/modules, and running update-initramfs -u
Should work OTB though.
I had an issue with the RTS5229 chipset in a PCI-e card where the device only works if a SD card is inserted during boot.
@Dje4321 Not yet and I can't at the moment
@catsay I got the Realtek drivers for Linux already sorted out because on the page where I found the ones for Windows I found the Linux ones too so I might aswell go with them. If those drivers don't work I'll follow your advice
I would ignore the drivers from the realtek page, they're usually for ancient kernels. And should already be included with the kernel OTB anyway.
UPDATE:
Looks like anything that any SD card that has been in something ever remotely smart is "flagged" as write protected by Windows. The SD from my camera works absolutely fine but if I try to write onto an SD card that has been in my old smartphone (Android 2.3.7, no data encryption or things like that) is considered write protected. Even the SD that's in my Sony recorder is flagged as read-only. I'm going to to further tests with another notebook. Or I'll just buy an external USB card reader.
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