Linux - HardwareThis forum is for Hardware issues.
Having trouble installing a piece of hardware? Want to know if that peripheral is compatible with Linux?
Notices
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.
You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!
Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.
Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.
Get a virtual cloud desktop with the Linux distro that you want in less than five minutes with Shells! With over 10 pre-installed distros to choose from, the worry-free installation life is here! Whether you are a digital nomad or just looking for flexibility, Shells can put your Linux machine on the device that you want to use.
Exclusive for LQ members, get up to 45% off per month. Click here for more info.
I'm hoping someone can help me out with this one. I've scoured the web for tutorials and howtos, and nothing I do seems to work. Here's my problem.
I have a Sandisk 8-in-1 USB card reader and am trying to get it to read inserted cards under Slackware 10.1 (custom kernel 2.4.30). I've installed the sg3_utils already and have scanned and mapped the devices:
The first two are my DVD writers ('cause you can't just have one!), and the rest are (assumed) to be each of the physical ports on the card reader. I do also find evidence of it in /proc/bus/usb/devices:
So at this point I have a populated SD card inserted, as well as a populated XD card inserted into the car reader (obvously both in different slots on the reader).
So with everything mapped, I try to mount the devices:
# mount /dev/sdc /mnt/sd
Works fine! I look in 'mount' and see:
# mount
<snip>
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
usbfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)
/dev/sdc on /mnt/sd type vfat (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
I know by looking at the contents that this is the SD card (and have setup my fstab accordingly for this device).
But now if I go and try any other card, it fails. (Note I explicitly specify the filesystem type otherwise it complains)
# mount -t vfat /dev/sda /mnt/tmpcard
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so
#mount -t vfat /dev/sdb /mnt/tmpcard
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so
# mount -t vfat /dev/sdd /mnt/tmpcard
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdd,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so
... so I take the error's advice, excluding the tail because there's more errors than a mere couple lines here:
#dmesg
<snip>
sdd: Unit Not Ready, sense:
Current 00:00: sense key Not Ready
Additional sense indicates Medium not present
sdd : READ CAPACITY failed.
sdd : status = 1, message = 00, host = 0, driver = 08
Current sd00:00: sense key Not Ready
Additional sense indicates Medium not present
sdd : block size assumed to be 512 bytes, disk size 1GB.
sdd: test WP failed, assume Write Enabled
sdd: I/O error: dev 08:30, sector 0
I/O error: dev 08:30, sector 0
unable to read partition table
Device not ready. Make sure there is a disc in the drive.
Device busy for revalidation (usage=1)
Device 08:30 not ready.
I/O error: dev 08:30, sector 0
FAT: unable to read boot sector
Device not ready. Make sure there is a disc in the drive.
sdd: Unit Not Ready, sense:
Current 00:00: sense key Not Ready
Additional sense indicates Medium not present
sdd : READ CAPACITY failed.
sdd : status = 1, message = 00, host = 0, driver = 08
Current sd00:00: sense key Not Ready
Additional sense indicates Medium not present
sdd : block size assumed to be 512 bytes, disk size 1GB.
sdd: test WP failed, assume Write Enabled
sdd: I/O error: dev 08:30, sector 0
I/O error: dev 08:30, sector 0
unable to read partition table
Device not ready. Make sure there is a disc in the drive.
Device not ready. Make sure there is a disc in the drive.
<snip>
.. and I get this pretty well for all the other cards.
Does this mean I need to format my other card? I hope not since I have about 200 digital photos on there that haven't been transferred to any other medium yet.
I read somewhere that sometimes each card is treated like a partition as opposed to a dedicated device, so I umounted everything and tried mounting specifying a partition:
# mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/sd
... and it hangs. The system still operates relatively alright, but it sits there seemingly forever and no matter how much I Ctrl+C or even kill the process from another tty, it just sits there. I left it alone after trying to terminate and kill it the other day, and when I went back to check on it a few hours later, it looked like it *had* terminated, but it obviously got me nowhere.
Does anyone have any ideas what else I might be able to try to get this thing working? USB has been a real thorn in my side for the last little while on this system, and I'd like very much to resolve it and cross it off my big list of administrative things-to-do on my system.
Luckily I figured this one ouf myself. Not 100% sure what it was that caused it (and other USB devices) to work more-or-less properly, but I am able to access the xD card from the Sandisk reader, as well as an SD card (simultaneously).
On the SD card, I was mounting it as> mount /dev/sdc /mnt/sd, which works fine.
When I went to try something similar on the xD card, it kept telling me it couldn't recognize the format of that device. Frustrated, I got all the data off the card and formatted it ON the Sandisk reader, and it seemed to work fine (using mkdosfs -c -C -n XDCARD /dev/sdb. note: I did this late last night a little intoxicated, so forgive me if I don't remember specifics I remember it failed once, so perhaps the -C is not required, OR I had to format it as /dev/sdb1... regardless, it formatted the card). BUT, it failed to work in my Olympus digital camera since it wanted to reformat the card again, which I did. Took some pictures and put the card in the reader and tried to mount as before, again, failing.
So then I tried the partition thing again, and it WORKED!:
> mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt/xd
Now, how did I know that it was /dev/sdb for the xD card? I tried to mount each SCSI device (except the DVD writers) using 'mount -t vfat /dev/sd[a-d] /mnt/<cardtype>, with the cards already inserted into the reader. I then examined the output in dmesg and noticed some differences in the errors being reported. At the time I only used two cards, the SD and the xD. I already knew which device my SD card was on, so it was a process of elimination to find the dmesg errors for the device, different from the other two. I won't go into specifics, but I believe it had to do with formatting/filesystem errors as opposed to 'make sure there is a disk in the drive'.
I decided to post this followup more for information reasons so that if anyone else has a similar problem with their Sandisk multicard reader, this might help point them in the right direction.
LinuxQuestions.org is looking for people interested in writing
Editorials, Articles, Reviews, and more. If you'd like to contribute
content, let us know.