I figured it out. I had installed both Ubuntu 7.04 and 8.10 on this system. After installing 8.10 I decided it was a disaster and went back to 7.04. However 8.10 had overwritten the boot block so that now grub looked on a different partition for it's configuration file. But only during boot. Once the system was booted the system assumed it needed to make updates to the partition for 7.04. Updates such as new kernels.
So now I had several kernels for 7.04, but the grub file I was booting from was stuck in the past and using only the old kernel. Now here it gets a little hazy. The old kernel used to work. But stopped working, probably during a kernel update. Perhaps the old kernel was using the new modules? Or perhaps other software which was updated had a kernel dependency. For whatever the reason, that kernel no longer worked with flash cards. When I updated the grub file on the 8.10 partition and then booted into 7.04, the flash card now looked right. Well mostly. It now showed up as the right size. But it still wouldn't mount. And it said "permission denied". I didn't mention this before. It used to say this when it was reporting the wrong partition size also. So this problem was a separate issue. Well, I took a look at my /etc/fstab file. I often need to mount lots of partitions and don't always want to use the dbus mechanism to do it. So I had an entry for /dev/sda1, the same that was used by dbus for the flash card. When I commented that out, the card mounted properly. So everything is now working. There was nothing wrong with the flash card. The problem was something borked in the kernel updates and in /etc/fstab. -- Allen Brown abrown at peak.org http://brown.armoredpenguin.com/~abrown/ Truth poses no threat to anyone save those who rely on untruth as the cornerstone of their foundations. --- Peter in Australia Allen Brown wrote:
I find it's even weirder than I thought. And I don't think it has anything to do with plugging into my roomie's camera. Instead it may have to do with updates to Ubuntu. I have two identical MMC flash cards bought at the same time. I only plugged one of them into her camera. But now both show up as 4GB on my Ubuntu 7.04. I have another computer, with Ubuntu 8.10. It shows both flash cards as 2GB. Also interesting is that the Ubuntu 7.04 computer fails to mount the MMC cards, and refuses to partition them. It says they are read-only. The Ubuntu 8.10 card has no problem with any of this and will happily write them. The Ubuntu 7.04 computer used to read these cards without trouble. I can only guess that it was a recent update that broke it. desktop laptop Ubuntu 7.04 Ubuntu 8.10 report 4GB report 2GB read-only read-write fail mount mount no problem
_______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
