Nikon D5100 giving error message "No SD card inserted"

wex3333

Greetings

Two years ago, I bought a (new) Nikon D5100 from BestBuy. Shortly thereafter I bought a SanDisk 8GB SDHC card that I have used without incident since...until now. Last week I started intermittently getting the message " No SD card inserted", and occasionally a message that the card was damaged. Popping the card out and then putting it back in however seemed to resolve the problem. In the past few days however the camera has simply ceased to recognize the card, nor will recognize either the Kodak 2GB SD card that I originally used with it, or an old PNY 1GB card, this despite the fact that my old Canon SX20 works just fine with all three.

I have Firmware 1.01 preinstalled, and have tried the following fixes:
1.) Reformatting card on a Win7 computer(cannot reformat on camera as it will not detect), as well as on my SX20
2.) Can-of-Air'ing the card slot to remove any dust
3.) (Carefully) cleaning contacts on cards
4.) Pulling card and battery, waiting a moment and putting both back in.

Does anyone have any ideas before I ship the thing off to Nikon?

As a sidenote, I believe the night before this began, the card access light came on when I reinstalled the battery after charging it, and stayed on for several moments.

tcole1983

The two button reset.

https://support.nikonusa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/17395/~/how-to-reset-a-d-slr-to-factory-default-settings

Reset it to factory defaults and reinstall the newest firmware update.

Photobug

@Wex3333 - did you have the camera off before changing the battery? If not that could be the problem but doubt it.

My hunch is that your memory card is bad not the camera. Try the memory card in another camera. If it works reformat it in that camera then put it back into your D5100 and if it reads the card; reformat it again in the D5100. Never reformat a memory card on the computer. That may cure your problem. If it doesn't work, go buy another memory card. If it's one of the faster memory cards, it has a lifetime warranty. If it is one of their cheaper cards it maybe a year.

On a side note, my preference is to always use Lexar or SanDisk memory cards. They cost more but they are the best from reliability. The articles I have read indicate the best cards are Lexar and SanDisk. Do run a search here on memory cards - this has been discussed here before.

Get back and let us know if this fixed your problem. If you don't have another digital camera, go to a camera store and try it in a Nikon camera. And welcome to NRF.

wex3333

tcole: Unfortunately the blasted thing will not detect the card with the firmware update on it, or when it does, it so brief I don't have time to even start the update. And that is with both the Kodak 2 GB and San Disk 8GB cards.

Photobug: All three cards work just fine on my Canon SX20, which I also used to format both the 2 GB and 8GB cards a second time.

wex3333

Weird thing: Just lightly tapping on the card while its inserted seems to make it read, at least for a few moment. To me at least this seems to suggest that something is loose, or the pins are not properly contacting the card, the latter of which seems odd--ithe card still clicks in and seats as it always has, and none of the pins seem to be bent from what I can see looking in the slot. I did finally manage to update the firmware though while the card was reading, so we'll what happens.

Thank you guys

Photobug

Okay. Try another memory card and see what happens.