[wellylug] Unexplained (so far) incompatibility of USB card reader and Linux PC

[Donald Rogers]

I took this problem to the recent WellyLUG Instalfest and the gurus 
there did not manage to solve it. Chris suggested I pose it to this 
group. Can anyone  solve it? This is the situation. I have:
a Sony Memory Stick in a Memory Stick (TM) cardreader;
a PC with Intel Celeron 2600 MHz CPU on an ASUS P4VP-MX main board, with 
1024 MB DDR 400 RAM.
When I plug in another kind of USB card reader it works okay;
when I plug my card reader into either of two other computers it works okay;
BUT when I plug my card reader into my PC's USB port it fails every time.
I have Fedora Core 4 on one partition, and Mandriva LE2005 on another, 
and Ubuntu 5.04 on another - it makes no difference which I use. I even 
tried Ubuntu 5.04 Live CD and it failed too.

The dmesg file shows that the card reader is recognised but the software 
fails part way through. This is what I got in dmesg with Mandriva when I 
plugged the card reader into the USB port:

usb 4-5: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
SCSI subsystem initialized
Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
usbcore: registered new driver usb-storage
USB Mass Storage support registered.
usb-storage: device found at 2
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
  Vendor: Generic   Model: STORAGE DEVICE    Rev: 0100
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 00
usb-storage: device scan complete
SCSI device sda: 31680 512-byte hdwr sectors (16 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: Mode Sense: 02 00 00 00
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
SCSI device sda: 31680 512-byte hdwr sectors (16 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: Mode Sense: 02 00 00 00
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
 /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0:

Regards,
Donald