HOWTO Multicard reader

From Gentoo Linux Wiki

[edit] Configure the Kernel

First of all, you will need to prepare your kernel to recognize your card reader:

cd /usr/src/linux
make menuconfig

Device Drivers  --->
    SCSI device support  --->
       <*> SCSI device support
       <*>   SCSI disk support
       <*>   SCSI generic support
       [*]   Probe all LUNs on each SCSI device
    USB support --->
       <*> Support for Host-side USB 
       <*>   EHCI HCD (USB 2.0) support
       <*>   OHCI HCD support
       <*>   UHCI HCD (most Intel and Via) support 
       <*>   USB Mass Storage support

The first three SCSI options are necessary because the USB Mass Storage driver depends on them. The last SCSI option (Probe all LUNs) is required. Without it, only one slot of your device will work properly, because the system will stop looking for disk after it finds the first one. With this option it will keep looking for other disks until it probes all possible addresses. (There are also some new Multicard reader that does not need this option). The EHCI, OHCI and UHCI will be necessary depending on your USB host. My Toshiba Satellite, for instance, uses both EHCI (for USB 2.0) and UHCI (for USB 1.x).

Then make your kernel and install the modules:

make
make modules_install
cp System.map /boot/System.map
cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/bzImage
cp .config /boot/config

Edit a new text file in /etc/modules.d with this line in : options scsi_mod max_scsi_luns=8 (or another figure depending on the number of card slots) and do "update-modules" to re-generate /etc/modules.conf automatically

And reboot your system

shutdown -r now

[edit] Mounting the drives

You can have your desktop automatically mount cards as you insert them, setting the owner to the correct permissions etc. For Gnome, proceed to HOWTO gnome-volume-manager and ignore the rest of this page.

When your system comes back up, just plug your reader and you should be able to mount the cards using the /dev/sdX devices. My Iomega 7-in-1 reader maps the floppy to /dev/sda, the CF/MicroDrive to /dev/sdb and the SM/SD/MMC/MS to /dev/sdc, so if I want to mount my SD card, I need to run the following command:

mount -t vfat /dev/sdc1 /mnt/usb

You also can add entries like this to your fstab:

/dev/sda1  /mnt/floppy  auto  noauto  0  0
/dev/sdb1  /mnt/cf      auto  noauto  0  0
/dev/sdc1  /mnt/mmc     auto  noauto  0  0

so you can mount the drives simply by doing

mount /mnt/floppy

or

mount /mnt/cf

and so on ...

I hope that this doc helped.

Good luck,

--Rhashimoto 21:56, 30 Mar 2005 (GMT)

PS.: English isn't my first language, so feel free to fix my grammar errors ;-)

[edit] See Also

• HOWTO USB Mass Storage Device
• SD and MMC card readers (notebooks)