Hi all,

I recently bought an MP3 player that uses SD cards as it's storage device. I can connect it to Windows XP and drag music onto it no problems, however when I connect it to Suse 9.2 I get tons of error messages like:
etc..
When I connect it to DamnSmallLinux I get an error, but I can still mount the device and see the information on it, and run cfdisk, which I can't do in Suse.
Is it the fault of Suse, the device, or both? Should I recompile my kernel? If so, what flags do I need to set? I can use normal usb devices so I don't see what's wrong.

Thanks,
Dave.

If the device contains a normal FAT16 or FAT32 partition, it may help to re-format with SUSE. It is possible that it contains a faulty partition table. Windows is a little more tolerant here.

I wanted to do that but I can't, it won't read any partitions and I can't run cfdisk or fdisk.

When I run
sudo /sbin/cfdisk /dev/sda
I get
Fatal error Cannot open disk

So I seem to be screwed. I can run cfdisk in damnsmalllinux but it doesn't have mkfs.vfat, and I formatted it under XP but still no joy in SUSE

Maybe the drive is blocked by submount. Try to unmount/eject the drive and try again (even if you are certain that the drive is not mounted).

Nope, I turned off automounting in Suse, I found it too annoying I rebooted my computer and I still get the same errors. When I unplug it I get the usb disconnect signal, and plugging it back in just yields a ton of error messages

It may not apply here, but it's worth a try:

In older SUSE versions, some USB problems occurred due to the wrong order in which the usb kernel modules were loaded. The fix was to add the ehci-hcd module to /etc/sysconfig/kernel:
MODULES_LOADED_ON_BOOT="ehci-hcd"

Hey,

Gave that a try, no joy. Thanks anyway. Seems the error comes in where I usually get (and DSL does give with this device) :
instead SUSE gives

Ok, seems I'm not the first one with errors like this.
http://kerneltrap.org/node/6297

So where's the patch and how would I apply it?
Thanks

Unfortunately, the link on kerneltrap wasn't very helpful.
I hate to say this (I prefer to fix a problem instead of refering to another distro/versio), but maybe an update to a higher SUSE version will help.
You could also try to compile a more recent kernel.


P.S.: what happend to the FastestHamster? Eaten by the EvenFasterCat?

Ha, didn't realise I was posting with another username! Sitting at another computer that was already logged in.

Perhaps you're right, we have a freedom toaster at university, so I could burn suse 10. I was just soooo happy with 9.2! I've comiled oodles of software to install on it and recompiled the kernel so often (thanks to Nvidia ). But perhaps it is time to bite the bullet and upgrade.

Thanks for trying to help though. It's much appreciated

do you connect via a usb cable or do you put the sd card directly into your card reader integrated in your pc or laptop? if you plug it directly into the card reader you will not be able to read sd cards since the sd community/enterprises do not distribute open source licences for their cards, so you will not be in any case able to read a sd card directly. you could use an external card reader via usb or what is realized in the most digicams via the cam itself (via a usb cable too). this should be applicable to your mp3 player as well.

The mp3 player acts as an sd/mmc card reader which connects via usb. DamnSmallLinux has no problems with it, it's just SUSE

*UPDATE*

The player also does not work in Ubuntu which has kernel 2.6.12-9
Could the fact that it works in DSL be due to DSL using kernel 2.4? If so, what options can I compile into the 2.6 kernel to make it work?

Any suggestions welcome