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

Donald Rogers dero9753 at ihug.co.nz
Sat Oct 15 15:34:52 NZDT 2005


Thanks to all who tried to solve this one. It generated quite a bit of 
discussion (starting on 2 October).
To recap, 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.

This morning Nathan suggested an update of the BIOS on the mother board. 
The instructions in the ASUS manual are quite clear and simple. We 
downloaded the latest version (1013) from asus.com and ran the bios 
install program as directed, rebooted and (ta-da) it works now, on all 
installed distros.
The dmesg in Fedora Core 4 now reports:

usb 2-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2
SCSI subsystem initialized
Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
usb-storage: device found at 2
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
usbcore: registered new driver usb-storage
USB Mass Storage support registered.
  Vendor: Generic   Model: STORAGE DEVICE    Rev: 0100
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 00
usb-storage: device scan complete
SCSI device sda: 985088 512-byte hdwr sectors (504 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: Mode Sense: 02 00 00 00
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
SCSI device sda: 985088 512-byte hdwr sectors (504 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: Mode Sense: 02 00 00 00
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
 sda: sda1
Attached scsi removable disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SELinux: initialized (dev sda1, type vfat), uses genfs_contexts

The dmesg in Suse and Mandriva is slightly different. The last few lines 
in Madriva are:

sda: assuming drive cache: write through
 /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0: p1
Attached scsi removable disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
FAT: utf8 is not a recommended IO charset for FAT filesystems, filesystem will be case sensitive!

In FC4 it automatically detected the usb device, created /dev/sda1 and 
/media/usbdisk, and opened up gThumb. In Mandriva we looked at the 
Memory Stick with Digikam.

Thanks everyone. Karl was right: it was the BIOS.

Donald




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