Windows 7 PCMCIA card reader not working since W7 install.

[munkyone]

Hi, I have a big problem with a missing driver (I suspect) following a move from Vista64 to W7. I elected to do a clean install, since in my experience, upgrades are anything but straightforward. I saved all my drivers, settings etc on an external drive.

Following inatallation of W7 (64), I can no longer use my PCMCIA CF card reader. Device manager shows a mass storage controller under "other" devices, even with the card reader removed. If I uninstall this item and reboot, win7 cannot identify it to install a driver.

I have searched almost all day, with no success

Has anyone else on this forum seen this symptom?

My spec is as follows:
Acer Travelmate 5520.

CPU: AMD Turion 64 Mobile TK-55
RAM: 4 GB RAM Dual channel DDR2
Motherboard: Acer Travelmate 5520 version 0100 (Socket M2/S1G1) ATI RS690/RS690M Chipset.
Southbridge model ATI SB600, revision 00.

BIOS: Phoenix Technologies Ltd. V1.14.


Video: ATI Radeon X1200 Series (Acer ALI) GPU RS690M.
HDD: 250GB Western Digital SATA 7200 16MB Cache.
Audio: Realtek HD Audio device

Many thanks,

Jeremy.

 

[kemical]

Hi Jeremy,

Try using the compatibility options found here:

About the Windows 7 Compatibility Center

(you'll need to enter the suspect hardware in the drop down menu)

If still no joy then please post back..

 

[munkyone]

Hi Kemical,

Thanks for the pointer. I tried the upgrade adviser before upgrading. It suggested that the system was W7-64 compatible. I have since downloaded a number of driver scanners, ran them all without success. Each just see two"other" unidentifiable mass storage controllers.

I have since done some more investigation of the chipset, and found that these are SCSI emulating o2Micron MMC/SD etc storage controllers. I downloaded the vista drivers for these (could only fins 32-bit drivers) and they now seem to be correctly listed in device manager. So this may be of interest to any other ACER notebook upgraders here.

I still cannot get my HAMA PC-Card 32-bit CF reader to work. I have located the vista driver I saved before the upgrade (HAMACA32.sys) and put it in the system32 drivers folder, but cannot find a way to manually get the system to associate the driver with the device. Being much more of a UNIX person, my windows tech knowledge is flaky at best.

Any guidance from this forum on how to manually associate the device with the driver, would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks and regards,

Jeremy.

 

[kemical]

You could try installing it via the 'Device manager' (if it's actually showing there of course or perhaps your seeing a yellow question mark?) If you can see it or a yellow question mark try right-clicking on the offending object,choose properties and then 'update driver'. You should then be able to point it to where you have the driver stored..

Does windows update show up anything when you run that?

 

[munkyone]

Hi,

Just tried that again. It appears as a question mark, as you suggested. Frustratingly, I know where the driver file is. I put it in the ../system32/ dir. When I try to point device manager to this file, it seems I can only point to the folder and not the file itself, and since windows does not know what the device is, it can't decide which file to load. My windows knowledge is nowhere near my unix experience, so I don't know how to force an association between the device and the driver.

Is there a way to force this association manually in windows? A registry hack perhaps?

Thanks for your help with this. I appreciate it.

Jeremy.

 

[Saltgrass]

Is there a motherboard/chipset driver for your system?

 

[kemical]

I don't know why I didn't mention this before but have you been on the laptop manufacturers website? If not, I'm pretty sure that you'll at least find a vista driver which you could try running in compatibility mode if it gives you trouble..

In fact I did some checking and here is your driver page (check screenshot)

Link Removed due to 404 Error

Fingers crossed!

 

[munkyone]

Hi Kemical and Saltgrass,

Thanks for your help with this so far. I have the o2Micro drivers installed and the device manager now lists the hardware correctly. So... The only thing left is the card reader. The internal DS/MMC etc. reader works fine. However, I have a PCMCIA cardbus Compact Flash (CF) reader in the laptop. It is made by HAMA ( www.hama.de ), I also have the driver HAMACA32.sys. Problem is, I don't have the install utility, so installing it (for now) needs to be done manually. I am frustrated with windows, as it does not appear to be a simple matter to point the system to the driver file for this device. Using the update driver in dev man just points to the correct folder, but the system lacks the info to pick the correct file. So it just says it can't find it.

I have trawled Hama's site, with no luck. So my question now is, How can I instruct windows to load HAMACA32.sys and associate it with the CF reader? Is there a registry hack to do this?

Anyhow. I am contacting Hama for some more info on the product; we will see how helpful they are

Thanks again guys. for all of your thoughts on this.

Regards,

Jeremy.

 

[Saltgrass]

Many times installing a driver like that needs an .inf file to point to. There are also some .inf files that will install by right clicking and choosing to install.

If there is nothing in the reader, it may not show up in the Computer dialogue as you might expect.

Have you rebooted just in case it needs to be done? Is there anything in the bios to turn it on?

You might be able to just drop the driver into the Windows wow64 folder or whatever folder with the other drivers.