hello everyone, i am in dire need of help getting my laptop to recognize SD cards and MicroSD cards under 2008 R2. The name of the device in question is "Realtek PCIE CardReader" as listed in Device Manager under the category "Memory technology driver". I have the driver for this from the Acer support/downloads site, and I also have a newer driver version that I obtained directly from the Realtek downloads site. one thing I have learned about drivers is that your PC manufacturer may not always have the latest driver versions, sometimes it is best to go directly to the manufacturer of the actual internal device itself and get the most recent version from them. I also use an app called DriverMax to keep drivers up to date, it is totally free under the condition that you may download a limit of 1 driver per day after registering. premium subscribers are unlimited.

The Realtek site says it is compatible with XP/Vista/7, but makes no mention of Server anywhere. so after trying the Acer version I then tried the Realtek version as well. In both cases the dialog stated that the driver had installled successfully, and both times Device Manager listed the driver as working. but when i try to insert SD/MicroSD cards from my digital camera, Android phone, etc. I never heard the distinct sound that Windows makes when you insert a new device, and it never shows up in Windows Explorer or the other alternative file managers I have (Directory Opus and Total Commander). I also had this same problem in Win7. It all started right after I installed AVG Internet Security 2011 Business Edition, which is the only version of AVG I can find that will install on Server, the consumer version says the OS is incompatible or some crap like that.

With AVG enabled the driver installs failed both times, with AVG temporarily turned off they were successful both times. I also have Windows Update set to search for/install drivers automatically. I have tried inserting numerous card brands from different manufacturers, none will recognize. the most strange thing is that just a few days ago they were recognizing perfectly. I also searched Google and found numerous articles about SD cards not recognizing under Win7, which is very similar to 2008 R2. I need to use these cards for my photos, videos, phone data files, and also for use with a Windows app called Eboostr, which basically gives an extra RAM boost, basically like ReadyBoost. I am well aware that R2 doesnt support ReadyBoost or SuperFetch. the main reason I switched to Server is for the performance boost overall, i find that it runs so much better on this netbook than Win7 Ultimate x64.

When my cards were still being recognized a few days back, i noticed that every time i would reboot they would no longer show in Explorer even though I had never removed the card from the slot. they also wouldnt show up in the Eboostr control panel as an active cache drive. I remedied the problem by simply removing and reinserting the cards, which fixed both issues. As a side question, is there a way to force SD cards to stay mounted after a reboot without having to manually remove/reinsert them? I ask this because my USB flash drives and portable terabyte drive never have this issue.

I'm not 100% certain that AVG is the absolute cause of my issues because I have uninstalled and reinstalled it and the problem still persists either way. I think it may be due to a registry issue or the driver not initializing on startup, not sure one way or the other. That may or may not explain why the device is shown as working in Device Manager.

Well, if anyone can help me figure this out I would greatly appreciate the assistance. Please reply soon (the sooner the better lol).

Well that is odd.

I have a SanDisk card reader and all my SD cards work on it with R2. I use Symantec Endpoint as AV + Firewall solution and all ok.

Furthermore SuperFetch works on R2, please check here viewtopic.php?f=25&t=972 and here viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1924.

I got ReadyBoost working on R2 manually combined with SuperFetch.

Maybe you should disable and/or remove AVG and see how it works without.

Regards,

N

thanks for the reply but that still doesnt solve the problem. i completely disabled AVG and no go. i then uninstalled it and cleaned up the registry entries and files it left behind (i use Revo Uninstaller Pro for that, it gets rid of all the minuscule crap that the Windows Installer/Uninstaller misses). but even still, no go. i then reinstalled and uninstalled AVG again and tried once more, nothing. as it stands now i'm not sure what else to do, i need these cards and such to work,ive spent the last 2 weeks installing 2008 R2 and customizing it , adding software etc and i'm not about to reinstall now. i called AVG tech support and they said AVG probably isnt whats preventing my cards from being recognized. also sent an email to Realtek support, they replied unusually quickly with a statement that said that their card reader drivers should theoretically work on Server just as well as it does on Win7, even though Server isnt OFFICIALLY supported. like i said i had this working on Server just a few days ago.

ive checked out the links you posted and will definitely give the Converter a go. i would love to see Windows Media Center ported from 7 to R2. also, from what i've read superfetch and readyboost can be enabled in R2 but dont actually do anything in relation to performance, that its nothing more than adding some files and registry entries and that the cache populates itself nothing more. ive also heard that the R2 kernel does not support either of these. have you did thorough testing to ensure that readyboost and superfetch are actually giving a performance increase rather than simply wasting cpu cycles/ram doing nothing?

getting back to my issue though, how can i troubleshoot this? what steps can i take to address the issue, since the driver is clearly listed as working in Device Manager? if AVG is really the cause of the problem , then do i really have to give up my AV protection just to get my cards recognized? i paid good money for a license for AVG is all. as it stands now AVG is completely removed and the issue persists regardless, so i'm not 100% certain that its the cause.

if you or anyone else here can help me resolve this then please reply. thanks.

Very interesting analysis you did. You seemed to have made lots of research.

Nevertheless you are speaking about the driver for your card reader, did you encounter any issues installing it ?

If I ask the question, if that you can install the driver on R2 but if it's not laoded in Kernel then your device will not work.

Maybe you should try to disable Driver Signature Enforcement in R2 to see if the driver loads then with Kernel.

You'll get a ugly test sign watermark but maybe that's where the problem is.

Please check here for a good tool to do that :

http://www.ngohq.com/home.php?page=dseo

Let us know how all this works out.

Please fix me a link for your drivers, I would like to take a look at them please.

Regards,

The Horsemen

"Nevertheless you are speaking about the driver for your card reader, did you encounter any issues installing it ?"

AVG has a feature that allows you to disable it for a short time without uninstalling it. Before doing that, both drivers failed to install both times. after using the disable feature, both drivers successfully installed both times. It still shows up in Device Manager as working.

i used the tool you linked to disable driver signature enforcement, when i reboot and insert any card in the slot, nothing. i followed the instructions for the tool to the tee, first i disabled DSE then rebooted, then used the tool to sign the driver files for the device, as listed in the driver details section of Device Manager, then rebooted again. for your review i am attaching a screenshot of the Device Manager dialog that shows the names of the drivers.

here are the download links for the Acer and Realtek versions of the card reader driver. the only difference between them that I can see is that one is simply a newer version (the one by Realtek). the newer one is the one I currently have now.

Acer: http://support.acer.com/us/en/product/default.aspx?modelId=3659

scroll midway down the page, you will see the link for it.

Realtek: http://www.realtek.com/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=25&PFid=25&Level=4&Conn=3&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false#RTS5101/RTS5111/RTS5116

on this page you will need to get the 3rd link from the top titled "PCIE card reader driver for XP/Vista/Win7"

for your review i am also attaching a complete system review file that I produced with an app called Everest Ultimate Edition (now known as AIDA64 since Everest was bought out). It is a assessment/diagnostics tools used by hardcore PC users, especially overclocking types. You may have heard of it. Device Manager will not allow me to export a snapshot of my system details to a file, so I've used this instead. It should list all devices and relevant info. It is ALOT of info (and I do mean that). Sorry if it's too much, but i figure the more info the better. you can simply skip the parts you deem irrelevant, as it is all conveniently separated into categories. It may or may not help out in the end.

As a side question, did you and the other Horsemen ever figure out whether the SuperFetch and ReadyBoost in R2 actually produces verifiable performance improvements? i asked in my last post, must've been overlooked.

Well, thats all for now. reply soon!

Here is a video of a restart test of my machine.



I used a 2GB Kingston flash drive (readyboost) and Superfetch to perform a Boot Optimization to achieve the desired boot time below. My specs are Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, 8GB DDR2 800Mhz RAM, 250GB (OS) + 500GB (data) 7200 RPM HDDs, and a generic EVGA GeForce GT240 video card. This boot time is including the slight delay that is caused by the boot timer utility starting up at logon.



The true "uptime" of my machine is below:

Halladay rules, i have watched the video but am hardly convinced that SuperFetch/ReadyBoost actually produces results. maybe you are doing some other kind of tweaks to your machine that would decrease your boottime. For one thing, i have read the 6 to 7 page long topic on this and there are numerous posts about things like superfetch being explicitly disabled in the kernel by microsoft, and other posts alleging that it is nothing more than a service running and a cache populating, but no actual performance increase. the kernel goes deeper than even Windows itself, the kernel is not an operating system, it is the foundation upon which Windows runs. as it stands now, without a kernel Windows cannot and will not run. Neige was saying in his last post that a device driver will not initialize if the kernel does not recognize the driver.

Furthermore, you are running 2008 R2 on a desktop ( or at least a laptop), whereas I am running on a netbook with 1 gig of RAM and Atom processors. this thing could never achieve that kind of performance/response time, no matter the amount of tweaking. I know of a store online that sells 2 gig DDR3 RAM chips for netbooks, next week i am going to upgrade it and hopefully that will help alot. Every time i check task manager it still shows as havingbetween 40 to 50% (on average) CPU being used, but shows memory as being almost maxed out most of the time. I originally wanted to run Win7Ultimate x64 on here but it was almost as slow as Vista at times, so I decided to give R2 x64 a try when i found out my processor supports a 64 bit host OS. I realize that 64 bit on a netbook is probably overkill but i want to be able to run x86 and x64 versions of apps.the only reason i even consider running R2 on this thing at all is cuz i figured it would run a little better than 7. and sure enough it does but i am still getting some lag in certain things like apps being slow to start or Windows menus/Control Panel being slow to appear. But I've got a feeling that is mostly due to my RAM and startup apps than to anything elsei'm doing. will probably run Windows 7 Enterprise on the ASUS gaming laptop i'll be buying in a few months, last time i tried running R2 on my last gaming laptop games like Grand Theft Auto IV and several other apps encountered serious issues. when windows 8 hits RTM status i'll definitely be running that instead.

Also, what other tools/software are you using to optimize your boottime, if any? And how do you go about performing a proper boottime test? I am into computers and stuff but i'm nowhere near an expert, coding guru, or a repair specialist, etc, and im not a IT pro either. I screw around with computers and general electronics for fun and have done so since childhood, though never to make money in a career setting. have tried linux a few times as well but found it to be a little on the complex side of things, plus it doesnt run my games and Windows apps, which i cant live without.

Do you have any idea how to go about properly slipstreaming Service Pack 1 into 2008 R2 Enterprise 64 bit? i am sick and tired of having to install wave after wave of updates upon reinstall that almost never seem to end, then have to install SP1, then followed by even more updates, as well as updates for various MS products i have installed ( office 210 pro plus, visual studio 2010, .NET Framework 4,various versions of SQL Server, etc). I am hoping to create an ISO image that wil already have SP1 included as part of the initial install. Also, i would like to have things to where various other updates (besides SP1) can be preinstalled as well. I already know how to go about downloading SP1 as a standalone package, and the updates as standalone MSU packages. but i have no idea how to roll that into an iso file. and since this is a netbook then i have to create usb boot key, for that i have a SanDisk 16 gig key that has more than enough room for Windows, SP1, and the updates i want.

Am still hoping Neige will reply soon, since the overall purpose is to get my SD cards to work again.

Thanks for now!

I understand your argument completely and I have rebutted my feelings on the whole superfetch/readyboost debate before. One problem I have found with Superfetch is that when you populate your RAM with cached data, you will find that most of the time another program populates into RAM and pushes the cached data out. This is especially noticeable on a machine with a small pool of available memory. Say your example Superfetch has cached Microsoft Office, Windows Media Player, DivX Player, and Internet Explorer. Ok great. Now 10 minutes later your antivirus runs a background scan, but because you had no available memory left it was forced to page some contents of that cached RAM out of memory. What is the point of Superfetch if my cached applications are constantly being pushed off the bed?! This is not a problem if you have 10 little monkies jumping on a bed the size of Europe. The whole concept of "free memory is wasted memory" is only true if you can afford to give it away. But even if you have a sizable chunk of memory, Superfetch is usually hit or miss on populating your applications in memory.

The second problem that exists with Superfetch is the way its prediction algorithm tries to monitor user behavior and load the applications that it thinks the user will use at certain time of day. This is not a problem for a person like me whom has 8GB. If Superfetch loads an application that I don't need into memory, its not a problem because I still have plenty of available memory to go around. Now lets say that this prediction algorithm starts loading applications into memory on your 1GB netbook, but its an application that you use not as often. Now your RAM is populated with useless data and because you have a small pool of memory available the next application that you launch will act no differently then if you Superfetch disabled!

I always try to picture the Superfetch concept as the "drinking bird" in this YouTube video.



The bird on the left with the green cup is your netbook with 1GB of RAM.
The bird on the right with the clear cup is my quad core with 8GB of RAM.

Every time the bird takes a drink of water it symbolizes Superfetch accessing data from your hard drive and caching it into RAM. Notice how the bird of the left goes to the cup of water a lot more often than bird on the right. The same principal is true for my machine versus yours. My 8GB of RAM can keep more applications into memory a lot longer than your 1GB netbook can and thus I will could actually see noticeable performance gains of Superfetch over time, PROVIDED its prediction algorithm is smart enough to load the correct applications into memory.



You are exactly right. On my YouTube Channel (win2008workstation) I point out in the description of my Boot Optimization video that these performance tweaks are platform specific. I tried the same exact routine on my dual core laptop with 3GB but couldn't get my machine to boot in under 40 seconds. Understandably a 5400RPM HDD will not see the same performance benefits as a high speed, low latency 7200 RPM drive.



I ran R2 on my Intel core 2 duo T7250, 3GB (DDR2 800) laptop with Superfetch enabled and I can honestly tell you that Superfetch made absolutely no difference. Even if all the boot optimization strategies that I implemented on my desktop, the lowest boot time I saw on R2 was 50 seconds. I don't think its particularly Superfetch's fault but rather the bottleneck of my hardware thats the problem. Running Superfetch on a laptop with 4GB of RAM is completely useless if you have a 4200RPM/5400RPM HDD with a high latency seek time. Even if Superfetch attempts the load the application into memory it is going to have a hard time doing so with that bottleneck.



When I did run R2 on my laptop even though the boot time wasn't the fastest the applications were pretty responsive, but I credit eBoostr for doing most of the work. It works much like Readyboost/Superfetch but more efficiently on low resource machines like netbooks or laptops.

You can try enabling boot optimization to see if you notice any performance gains.



Worth a shot. I think you are going to be a lot better off with the hardware upgrade over anything else.

HalladayRules: I have read some of your posts here and saw that your name is Steve. Well, so is mine. Nice to be acquainted with you. But getting on with it, do you know of any commercially available apps that do what SuperFetch does, but in a more efficient manner, and/or also arent explicitly dependent upon support in the Kernel? I have used the Converter linked on the main page of this site to build in some new features, and the SuperFetch service is now running, but when i go to the Properties tab of a usb flash drive the ReadyBoost tab doesnt show up. what am I doing wrong? I watched your video(s) in the last post and I kind of understand the points you are trying to make. But I still have no way of knowing if the SuperFetch cache is populating, if at all, or why the ReadyBoost tab doesnt appear. I rebooted promptly after making the changes in the Converter. And I don't quite get the concept of how to enable boot optimization like your video shows, much less how to perform a proper benchmark to see if it's actually working or not.

Neige: I am extremely eager (and impatient) to get this issue resolved, so I have also posted a similar topic to the [url]SevenForums.com[/url] forums. I understand you are trying to help, and I appreciate your assistance.

That's all for now!

Hi Enigma,

I do not use Superfetch at all on my R2 release since I have 16 GB Ram on my PC. I have some serious doubts on it's necessity in R2 in anyway. That service was pain on Vista and on 7 too.

But I will not prevent people from using and/or if it needs to be updated in our tools then we will. It was a great achievement for all of us here to get it working and that's what counts.

I am a little delayed on getting some things done since I am a bit busy at work till tomorrow.

I shall have some feedback on Saturday for you.

Warm regards,

N