I have a 32 GB Kingston SDHC microSD card which has to communicate to MSP430F2618 via SPI. I was not able to initialize it by using CMD55 + ACMD41 (with bit30 set to 1), as it is described in SD specification paper. What works is this sequence:
CMD0, arg: 0 , CRC: 0x95 (response:0x01)
CMD8, arg: 0x1AA , CRC: 0x87 (response:0x01)
CMD1, arg: 0x40000000, CRC: 0xFF (response:0x00)
I tried it also with a 8 GB SanDisk card and works for that too. So actually, I am using CMD1 here, not ACMD41, with HCS bit set to 1. However, it is not stable, sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. This may be about hardware.
Is it not strange that cards are responding to CMD1 with argument 0x40000000
?