Card Reader Strangeness


Ravnos

Asleep in Samsara
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To sum up the problem, I have two card readers that won't mount my SD cards. The CF slot in both readers works fine, but neither will read SDs for some reason. I've tried under 3 OSes (WinXP, FreeBSD 6.0, and Ubuntu Breezy). The first card reader, a Vantec internal reader recognizes that there's a card in the slot, but when I run mount under Linux, I get this:
RodimusPrime:~$ sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdb /mnt/temp/
mount: No medium found

With the other card reader, an external one (not sure of the brand), I get this:
[ 778.418740] sdf: assuming drive cache: write through
[ 778.432727] sdf: assuming drive cache: write through
[ 778.436228] Buffer I/O error on device sdf, logical block 0
[ 778.439222] Buffer I/O error on device sdf, logical block 0
[ 778.447222] Buffer I/O error on device sdf, logical block 0
[ 778.447402] Buffer I/O error on device sdf, logical block 1
[ 778.447575] Buffer I/O error on device sdf, logical block 2
[ 778.447748] Buffer I/O error on device sdf, logical block 3
[ 778.447928] Buffer I/O error on device sdf, logical block 4
[ 778.448100] Buffer I/O error on device sdf, logical block 5
[ 778.448272] Buffer I/O error on device sdf, logical block 6
[ 778.448445] Buffer I/O error on device sdf, logical block 7

For reference, this same card reader gives this for CF:
[ 1347.100457] sdg: assuming drive cache: write through
[ 1347.116442] sdg: assuming drive cache: write through
[ 1347.270346] FAT: utf8 is not a recommended IO charset for FAT filesystems, filesystem will be case sensitive!

Then I can access it under /media/usbdisk/

With reader #2 under FreeBSD, I get this when I plug it in:
umass1: Generic Mass Storage Device, rev 2.00/1.26, addr 3
da4 at umass-sim1 bus 1 target 0 lun 0
da4: <Generic USB SD Reader 1.00> Removable Direct Access SCSI-0 device
da4: 40.000MB/s transfers
da4: 976MB (1999872 512 byte sectors: 64H 32S/T 976C)

But when I try to mount the SD card, I get this:
RodimusPrime# mount -t msdosfs /dev/da4 /mnt/temp
g_vfs_done():da4[READ(offset=0, length=2048)]error = 16
mount_msdosfs: /dev/da4: Device busy

Under Windows, card reader one shows up but again, it can't see the SD card (CF cards work fine, though). Card reader two, the SD card shows up under Disk Management as unreadable.

Just in case anyone's thinking this might be a problem with the SD cards, all 3 work fine in my GP2X and all 3 mount automatically under Linux when in my girlfriend's RCA Lyra.

I tried googling this, but it turned up a lot of unrelated information (mostly related to general card reader failures), so I'm wondering if the smart kids here have any ideas.

Edit: A bit more info, I should have put this in right away.
looking at /proc/scsi/scsi in Linux shows this (for the first reader, the second one is the same except it's scsi5):
Attached devices:
...
Host: scsi4 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Vendor: Generic Model: USB SD Reader Rev: 1.00
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02

and cfdisk /dev/sdf (the second card reader) gives this:
FATAL ERROR: Cannot read disk drive
Press any key to exit cfdisk

If any of this can help you help me, it would be appreciated.
 
Ok, in case anyone read this and was as puzzled as I was, I found the problem, and it's a little embarassing...



...I was putting the SD cards in the wrong way. I was putting them in label-up, like the CF card goes, like the SD goes into the external reader. Except the internal reader doesn't work that way for some stupid fucking reason. It's label down for SDs.

The external one is still fucked, though.
 
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