Mepis: Sandisk Usb Sd Reader and hotplug problems
 

I'm using Mepis Linux (version 2003.10.02, it's a debian based distro, kernel 2.4.22) since the last month, and I'm happy with it. :) I "apt-get update/upgrade" daily my system to keep it up to date, but I've never done a "dist-upgrade".
Since one or two weeks after an upgrade I got an error message during the boot of the system, something like that:
Starting hotplug subsytem: pci*** can't synthesize pci hotplug
kernel usbcore already loaded (this line for 5 times)
kernel printer already loaded
After this message the system boots with no problems, also my usb printer is working, so I was not really worried...

Two days ago I bought a Sandisk Securmate Sd Reader. It's working perfectly in Windows, but in Linux I have problems...
The first time I plugged it with the system already booted: it was correctly seen by meauto and I was able to boot it and read from it. I tried to write something and everything seemed to be good, but it created a corrupted file the first time, the second time it created nothing and another time it worked nice. This is the first problem....

The second "big" problem is at the boot time: if I leave it plugged (as it should be) the boot hangs when it arrives at the line: "Updating fstab..."
I tried to add the line:
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs defaults,devmode=0666 0 0
in my fstab before the "dynamic lines" comment (as suggested in other posts in Mepis forum), but nothing was resolved.
The bad thing is that after the hang up I have to reboot, wait for fsck to run, reboot another time, than the system boots, but with lines and lines of error messages ( i.e.: "cat:/proc/cmdline: no such file or directory" " cannot remove /dev/dvd/" and so on). The next time I boot (obviously without the Sandisk SD reader connected) everything returns ok.

Does anybody know solutions for my problems?