I followed the instructions at
http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/USB_Card_Readers

and the mount worked perfectly. I could see my mem card files.

So I got brave and tried to play with it a bit. I unmounted the drive and plugged the usb cable into a different usb port on the rear panel. After a bunch of confusing results I didn't keep track of, I got back to what appeared like the original situation I started with.

But now when I try to mount the drive with:

mount -tvfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive I get:

/dev/sda1 is not a valid block device

But the listing for /dev/sda1 looks good to me and "file /dev/sda1" reports:
"sda1: block special (8/1)"

Any Idea how I screwed it up? 8^(

Thanks,

Utah

Have you tried mounting without specifying the file system type?

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive

I'm usually able to mount usb drives letting mount detect the file system type. Also you may want to try /dev/sda2 or one of the other scsi devices if you have another device on your system that might be taking sda1.

Thanks for the tip on not including the file system type. When I get it working again I'll try that again.

But it didn't make any difference now. And yes, I've tried sda, sda1, sda2, sdb, sdb1, sdb2, etc, etc with the same results. The message makes me think it something far more basic like I've screwed the device files or something like that.

Utah

Well, I finally made some progress on this. I rebooted with the (memorystick) card IN the reader. Now dmesg |grep sda |less shows some info on the card like: "sda: sda1" and other interesting info.

Now I do the mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbmemstk
and it worked!

It's important (apparently) to always umount the fs before pulling the card out of the reader. As long as I do this, I can reboot with the empty reader plugged into the usb port and then mount it again and it works.

I guess usb is not quite as "plug 'n play" as it is in Windows.... That's ok, it's working and I've learned something.

Utah

Hehe

I was about to ask you if you unmounted the drive before disconnecting it but I 'assumed' that it would have been redundant.

Guess that's what I get for assuming.

Just like any other file system in linux, it must be unmounted. The result of not doing so can be a corrupt file system.