return void;

About a year and a half ago, I purchased a cheap $15 multi-flash card reader from Newegg. I have had this stupid device plugged into my motherboard and wasting power ever since. I was never successful in plugging in my flash cards and having them detected.

Until now.

I posted about upgrading my machine recently, which included a kernel update to 2.6.21-gentoo. I figured it was high time to get this device working, so I spent a few hours and figured out my problem. I have a Neodio Technologies 7-in-1 reader as detected by lsusb:

citadel s1n # lsusb
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0aec:3260 Neodio Technologies Corp. 7-in-1 Card Reader
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 03f0:8804 Hewlett-Packard
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:8187 Realtek Semiconductor Corp.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

The problem I was having was the device nodes were never being created, with the exception of /dev/sda. Well I learned that USB flash card readers do not automatically report when a card has been inserted. The solution to this is to make sure that your kernel has the following option set:

CONFIG_SCSI_MULTI_LUN=y
CONFIG_SCSI_SCAN_ASYNC=y

The async scan option is a nice feature that can significantly improve your bootup time if you have several UMS devices or SCSI devices connected. This will make sure that all LUNs are scanned as the other devices may not be detected. In my case, the /dev/sda was actually just the CF card reader slot.

After rebooting, I found each card slot was detected and now associated to individual devices:

usb-storage: device scan complete
scsi 8:0:0:0: Direct-Access GENERIC USB Storage-SMC I19B PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
scsi 8:0:0:1: Direct-Access GENERIC USB Storage-CFC I19B PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
scsi 8:0:0:2: Direct-Access GENERIC USB Storage-SDC I19B PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
scsi 8:0:0:3: Direct-Access GENERIC USB Storage-MSC I19B PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sda
sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
sd 8:0:0:1: Attached scsi removable disk sdb
sd 8:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
sd 8:0:0:2: Attached scsi removable disk sdc
sd 8:0:0:2: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
sd 8:0:0:3: Attached scsi removable disk sdd
sd 8:0:0:3: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0

When I logged into Gnome, I found this lovely gnome-vfs icon indicating the flash drive from my camera that I plugged in. The mount options show up as follows:

/dev/sdc1 on /media/disk type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,shortname=winnt,uid=1000)

Now that everything is merry in the hellkeep kingdom once more, I can move on to organizing my photos once more.