Memory Stick Card Reader, Debian "Lenny" FAILURE!
 

I am using Debian "Lenny" on a Sony Vaio VGN-TZ195N in my quest for 100% compatibility I have taken on the "Memory Stick" reader. Googling revealed many posts about a USB "Memory Stick" reader but I am not so lucky, as shown below...

lspci | grep -i ricoh
09:04.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev ba)
09:04.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 04)
09:04.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C843 MMC Host Controller (rev ff)
09:04.4 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 11)

No... I have a PCI memory stick reader. After reading this post Ricoh memory card reader in Ubuntu I downloaded and installed the EXPERIMENTAL module found on source forge. It is loaded and installed as shown below...

lsmod | egrep -i 'ricoh|sdhci|mmc'
mmc_core 39388 1 tifm_sd
ricoh_mmc 3616 0

Now unless I am looking for the WRONG block device... What the hell am I doing wrong?

blkid
/dev/hda1: UUID="4b8cca9d-62d9-4608-8285-0cbd905cb5cd" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/hda3: TYPE="swap" UUID="f978ab4a-c5ea-4273-8e7c-4c6131c5d737"

ls /dev/mm* /dev/sd[b-z]
ls: cannot access /dev/mm*: No such file or directory
ls: cannot access /dev/sd[b-z]: No such file or directory

Run as root with a memory stick inserted:

# fdisk -l

and:

# cat /proc/partitions

See if the device is picked up in either output.

cat /proc/partitions
major minor #blocks name

3 0 46989312 hda
3 1 40829166 hda1
3 2 1 hda2
3 3 4192965 hda3
3 5 1959898 hda5

fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 48.1 GB, 48117055488 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 5849 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x1d92f849

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 5083 40829166 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 5606 5849 1959930 5 Extended
/dev/hda3 5084 5605 4192965 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda5 5606 5849 1959898+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

I looked at this output as well and sorry to say it is not mounting...

Those commands should list the device whether it's mounted or not. Since you get nothing, that would mean your device is not being detected which would point to a problem with your driver module. You can try inserting a memory stick and then run:

$ dmesg | tail

to see if the kernel is reacting in any way to having a memory stick inserted. The output may give some clue as to what is going on.

Yeah, I have done that too. It's definitely NOT being detected... Ricoh is not making any drivers for this unfortunately and this is a PCI device not USB. Now I think this issue is supposed to be resolved in the 2.6.27 kernel do you know of anything on this or am I stuck with using an external card reader?

I can't tell you what's been addressed in the most recent kernel releases but if you want to try a newer kernel, a lot of distros will be releasing within the next month and they all will most likely have a 2.6.28 or 2.6.29 kernel. Ubuntu just released 9.04 with a 2.6.28 kernel. You can try that in livecd mode and see how it handles your device. If it works, you can see about updating to a newer kernel from within debian.

Thats good, hopefully Debian will be one of them... Thanks for your help, I'll post back once that update occurs.