7in1 Card reader not working in XP and is an XP issue

I am a professional photographer and rely on a 7in1 card reader to import my photos onto my computer. I mostly use Compact flash, microdrive or other large capacity media cards although have several other media cards various sizes right down to 64MB and have never (until now) had a problem with large capacity. Recently I got a bad virus on my system and needed a large external 500GB hard drive to back all my photos up before formatting. I have 2 x 80GB hard drives and can not risk loosing any data. The backup and restore was going to take too long so I put it aside for the near future when not so busy at work.

I swapped my hard drives out (Stored safely for future use) and installed a new one as a temporary measure running the same XP Pro with SP2 and all updates but my 7in1 card reader does not work. It plugs and plays and shows all drives in my computer. When I insert any card in any slot the light flashes to recognise card detection but when I click on the drive it states "the disk in drive (x) is not formatted do you want to format it now". I select yes but it fails and says "windows was unable to format this disk". I can format them as normal in the camera and on other xp systems using either of my card readers.

I have tried swapping the USB cable suspecting it damaged and tried swapping to different USB ports which all work with other USB devices as well as repetedly uninstalling and trying again even unistalling the USB controllers. Device manager says the device is working properly. The cards read and write fine in all my cameras and all works fine on other PC's running XP Pro. I swapped for a different spare 7in1 card reader and the same happens. The one came with install drivers but only for windows 9x not XP pro and the other had no drivers. Neither have any manufactorer details to obtain updates but I never needed them in the past. Any other system including my old one plugged and played without any need to install drivers. When my PC boots it checks my 1024 Ram, detects my hard drives and dvd drives then detects the 7in1 card reader before even loading into XP. All appears to be working correct. I tried booting from a windows Preinstallation Environment CD (Windows PE) and can read the cards from here I can also use Hyrens boot CD. Very awkward work around and do not have much control over where Im dragging and dropping with this method. Also sometimes when I boot back into XP the photos are not where I just copied them to. I can not risk a method as long winded and "flakey" as this for professional use.

So to recap 2 seperate card readers and many types and sizes of media cards all work but not on my newly installed XP. I have found similar occurances on the net and MS knowledge base but either with slightly different simptoms or no resolution.

Please help I am desperate and loosing money on a daily basis.

I already tried this. My mouse (being USB) goes off line for a while so I use the tab key to switch between items and unistall the rest then reboot. Yes XP detects the USB controllers and reinstalls them no problem. All other USB devices working again but not my Card reader it has the same problem. Just to be sure I just tried it again since you said but same happens.

The most annoying thing is I used to work in tech support for hardware and networking and this baffles the fook out of me.

Originally no I never bothered with my motherboard drivers and all worked fine but have even tried installing them with my new install and no help. Its a toughy alright!

It is generally a good idea to install all of the SPs in order. Can't say exactly why this is so, but even the "roll up" SPs instruct you to install earlier SPs first. Try that when you hae some time to kill.

HTH