m17 R4, built-in microSD card reader making laptop unusable

This same thing happened to me last week. My SD card is a samsung evo 128 GB and its a few years old. It had been sitting in my GoPro Hero5 for a few years, I usually transfer files over the USB C or over WIFI, but I had some big files I wanted to transfer quickly so I plugged it in and after trying a few times this same thing happened to me.

It was the first time I think I used the SD card slot so I honestly have no idea if its a problem with the drive.  I've been able to remove the Drive from Device Manager and then rescan for hardware changes, but restarting is really the only solution that gets the SD card mounted. At this point Im out of warranty so I'm treading very lightly with doing anything else.  It could be a firmware issue because I really dont think I've ever tried to use the SD slot in the ~3 years I've owned the laptop.

So after a painful process of attempting to copy my GoPro files, the drive dismounting constantly and restarting each time, I reformatted the SD card and ran chkdsk but it didnt find or fix any errors on the drive.

At this point I'm assuming some recent update either firmware or drivers has broken the mounting of the drive OR I could clean the inside of the drive and see if its like a physical problem inside that is causing the SDs to mount and unmount, but like I said, I'm out of warranty and the laptop runs well doing most everything else I need at this point I don't want to break the other things that are working.

This just happened to me as well. I don't recall if I had used the slot before. But now, it doesn't matter what card I put in there, the same message keeps coming up to insert a disc. Has anyone found a fix?

@MashNTx​ this isn't a new issue either, my laptop has been doing this for a pretty long time, probably over a year or so. I just decided to make the post in January because it gets super annoying to not be able to use a built-in feature. while obviously NOT A SOLUTION, you can use a usb SD card reader to get around it temporarily. 

but we really need a fixed driver or something for the built-in SD card reader.

the most recent driver (2023) for the built in SD card reader is broken. the old version of the driver is still on the dell support site, and I was able to roll the driver back with no issues so far (knock on wood, fingers crossed), though I wish there was an easy way to block specific drivers. it will try to update to the more recent (broken) driver. I wish Dell had an easy way to submit bug reports for broken drivers. this is unacceptable. Now that I think about it, I've been having these SD card issues since that update last year, but I didn't need to use it often enough at the time to really make a complaint.

I have the same problem - using the SD card reader in my m17 R4 for the first time since I bought it a few years ago, with a brand new Sandisk 256GB SD card

@RPT943​ Do you have a link for the old version of the driver you are trying? I'm not sure which is the correct one to use

@NeM2k2​ 

* Go to the generic m17 R4 Drivers & Downloads page

* Click "CATEGORY" to sort it
* Click "Show All"
* Expand, "Realtek Memory Card Reader Driver"
* Click, "Older versions"