Storage card pickiness between CE 2.0 devices?

I recently acquired a PC Card card reader for my A20, which delightfully also works in my A-11. However, when I put it into my 620LX I get mixed results. The majority of my media cards are Toshiba SD or Sandisk CF because of the cameras I have used for photography. Relevantly, the Toshiba SD cards don't want to work in the 620 despite working in both my Cassiopeias. I rummaged around to see what other cards I could come up with and found a Panasonic 8MB card as well as a couple of 16 and 32MB Canon MMC cards. All of those worked - so it's just the Toshibas that don't want to work. I've tried hard resets and everything to no avail, and it's all rather depressing because I've become reliant (largely thanks to older MP3 players and my rx1950) on large SD cards for portable storage.

I'm utterly stumped. If it didn't work in the A-20 either it'd make a lot more sense to me, as I was under the impression that the PC Card slot and ATADISK.DLL would be the same in both units as they're both CE 2.0. Though notably, the way that the 620 deals with the power on/off is different to the way the A-20 (and the A-11 for that matter) do it. The latter have a little pc card icon that pops up in the taskbar once a card is inserted you can use to cycle power. The A-20 also never asks for the CF card - once it's in it stays on, with no option.

My proficiency for the HPC is admittedly rather lacking, despite my love of these devices. Given some cards work, I'm guessing it could be a device ID issue, but I've yet to test that. I'm hoping that maybe another card will work in the unit.

Can anyone with more experience shed any light on this problem? I've literally got a fistful of toshiba SD cards I've built up over the years that I'd love to work with the 620...

This would be the very adapter that I thought was a USB controller

Like I said at the time, there was never a pcmcia.dll update for the 2.00 620. In the absence of a hardware problem, this is the most likely cause.

Have you checked the PCMCIA slot works with other cards? Checked for bent or imploded pins?

Yeah it works fine with my wireless card, and indeed the adapter works fine with some SD and MMC cards.

I've ruled out the capacity of the card today, as one of my friends uses a different brand of SD card (Sandisk) and it worked fine with no issues, so there is evidently something about the toshiba ones that something in the 620 doesn't like, because my laptop (via the pcmcia slot) reads them fine.

I think you're right - it seems to be a software thing. Now that I know the sandisk cards work, I'll just get one of those for it, so I can still swap files. Just a shame. I'd be interested in trying one of those CF>SD adapters to see if I had any luck there but they're not readily available at stores near me and I'm rather broke for the foreseeable future.

Thanks again anyway.

How big and how old are the Toshiba's?

There was a point a year or two (three) back when in the face of a very slow response from the SD specifications body over failings in the SD card address mapping system some of the SD card makers went off on their own to try and resolve the defects, this caused proprietary controller requirements to be needed when accessing some of the card releases, and inevitable the SD card group came out with their own fix which was completely different from anyone else’s and called it a standard.

You could simply have some of those cards.

I'm not entirely sure how old the Toshibas are, but the smallest is 256MB and the largest is 2GB. I accumulated the collection over the last 2 and a half years. That sort of explanation is the most sensible thing to my mind though.

1GB and higher are almost certainly within the guise of this being an issue, unless they're brand new (and you still need a standarised controller)