I have an Acer Aspire One netbook with 3 USB slots and an SD/MMC media card slot. There are two ways I can read my SD media cards in it:

- by inserting the card in a standalone USB card reader then plugging that reader into any of the USB ports;

OR

- simply inserting the media card in the built-in card slot.

I prefer using the built-in card slot for three reasons:

1) sometimes I need all the USB ports for something else (e.g. external keyboard and mouse + camera or cell phone);

2) as a matter of fact, the only standalone USB card reader I use to have stopped working suddenly, I need to buy a new one;

3) that's what the built-in card slot is for!!!

The problem with the built-in card slot is that it doesn't work every time. I often insert a card in it and... nothing happens. The card won't even turn up in the output of 'fdisk -l'. There are times when it will show up in 'fdisk -l', just won't be mounted automatically, but that I can forgive. My real beef is when it isn't detected at all. I wait, wait, wait... and nothing useful happens.

I have found two ways of fixing it, both very annoying:

- rebooting

- removing and inserting again... several times... until it finally gets detected and gets mounted or at least I can mount it manually.

QUESTION: Is there some command I can run on the command line to force the system to wake up, get off its butt and act upon the presence of the media card?

TIA

When it does mount the card reader, what is it designated as eg: sr01, sdb2 etc.

What shows up when cd /media/ when it is mounted?

CLI: sudo su
mkdir /media/card-reader
mount /dev/whatever /media/card-reader

Hope this helps