SD Card semaphore Timeout?

[TheUnseen]

Tried to load my 16GB SD card (which usually always worked before on this laptop with Windows 7 64 bit) but now get the error shown in screenshot.

Specs:

Transcent SD HC 16GB
Windows 7 64 bit
Sony Vaio laptop

 

[Corelogik]

Never had the issue myself, but found this in Google.

Error 0x80070079: The semaphore timeout period has expired

 

[Pusspa]

the only time i had that error was when i had an external usb hard drive with faulty sectors, it seems to be a timeout error. Is the SD card definately ok?

 

[Bill2]

1. It may be a problem with the connection. Try hooking up the card some other way say through an external card reader.

2. Does the card read right on another machine?

3. Does this error occur while copying files? That can happen with too long filenames or paths that are too long. Try renaming the file or folder and/or moving it up a directory or two before copying it.

 

[TheImmutable]

Thread necromancy doesn't make for a wonderful first post I admit. But this is the first google result, nobody on the entire internet has solved this problem, and I found out something new about it.

First: The fix I used. Mount the SD cards under any linux distribution (i used a kanotix livecd). That's it. Then they'll work under Windows again. This worked for one of my cards and made it usable again, but not the other. It's strange.

Second: What a semaphore is. from https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21094630. Essentially a semaphore timeout means the multitasking is being pre-empted by something else on a fairly low level.

The fact that this is a card-by-card error, and the fact that chkdsk reports the filesystem as raw (my error was only upon file access, not entire disk access, but other than that the symptoms are identical), makes me believe a faulty SD reader driver is altering something on the card itself, which when read back, causes some driver process to to hang. This was later fixed upon mounting and dismounting it under Linux. Now, with both of my cards, my mp3 player (and Linux on the same machine) were still perfectly able to make use of them with no timeout issues whatsoever so this is very exclusively a windows driver error.

To clarify: After mounting it and dismounting it under linux, one card returned to a normal usable state, the other did not. Both were able to function under Linux, where I obviously backed up the data on each. I then backed up the data AGAIN under windows to make sure the timeout error was gone (it was occurring on SPECIFIC files, so being able to do a full backup under windows with one card indicated the error was gone).

This is with a Thinkpad T510 which uses the Ricoh 4-in-1 card reader, which I believe is the same one Sony uses in their Vaio line.

 

[appyface]

I'm having the same error, with some SD cards and not others, using a Lenovo T510 laptop with a Ricoh card reader. Win7 Pro SP1 32-bit. The Win7 provided SD card reader driver, as well as the Ricoh SD card reader driver, issue the same semaphore timeout error for the cards that can't be read.

ALL cards I've tried to date are read and written correctly from my camera, my EeePC's card reader [not a Ricoh] and using a cheap four year old USB multi-card reader plugged in to any machine including the Lenovo T510 laptop.

The suggestion to mount and read using kanotix livecd hasn't helped yet (darn!) -- I'll keep trying. But I must concur the error lies with the Ricoh hardware and/or drivers, not the cards.