micro SD cards not recognized

[Şerban S.]

[member=25275]Şerban S.[/member]
[...]My thinking is that it is a kernel issue. [...] since the card reader is recognized in one kernel, but not others, wouldn't that point to the kernel being the cause ?

Hello, again!
Obviously, the management of the drivers and the IRQ assignment, is a kernel job. At least... in theory.
Practical issues occur though... Since we're dealing with patented hardware, the idilic theory of "open sourced architecture" seems to fail. See the Intel CPUs story. In any patented hardware, there are hidden "features" that serve a certain agenda, closely related to big money making. It is impossible to predict each and every small "twist" in each revision. Now, given the fact that Windows is commercial software, they have access to technical specs that are unavailable to the OpenSource world and this is well known for decades. This is why under Windows, it works. See the NVidia case for one.
As for what is happening under Linux, if it is a kernel issue (I too belive it is! ), patching might prove an extremely difficult task since newer kernels include more and more hardware support and sometimes, support for old hardware is wiped out, due to conflicts with the new hardware support. This leaves only one option: Tweaking the kernel with the blacklist option in the config file. This will allow ignoring a certain driver and install/load the driver that actually does the job properly, even if it is said to be "old" or "deprecated".
This is nothing like a child's play and should be done with a great deal of attention. Messing with kernel configuration, might render the machine unusable and this leads to reinstallation. In some cases, might render the hardware unusable or maybe worse, might damage it (for video cards, that might happen).

With those being said, the only thing that remains to do as I see things, is hope for a good fix from Jerry, although this will get you stucked with the respective kernel and the inherent limitations that emerge from this.

Good luck!
Best regards!