If the card reader is at all functional under Linux, it will be showing up as /dev/sda, sdb, etc., one for each card slot usually. These SCSI disks are assigned to hardware devices in order of hardware being encountered. If you plug your card reader in and have a SCSI hard disk system, you can have some serious fun there. If you have other USB storage devices, exact assignment will depend on the order in which you plug them in. (One could argue that this design of Linux is slightly deficient.)
If you plug a memory card in the reader and the card is recognised by Linux, the quickest way to find out where the card is in /dev/ is to run fdisk -l, which shows the partition tables of all visible disks. Flash cards always contain a partition table. Next thing you test is whether you can read data from the card in some useful quantities. dd is the tool of choice, e.g. dd bs=1k if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null count=20000 reads the first 20 megs or so from the card. (Also good for speed tests.) If there are no problems there and the card contains a valid filesystem besides a valid partition table, you can then mount it. > Just been to a customer who uses pen usb devices for backup of specific > data. Their devices ended up as /dev/sde1 and /dev/sdf1... different > ones for different makes of pen device. > > My worry is that they will reset after a reboot, and start counting from > sda1 ( well sdb1 in this case as there's a scsi disk in there). I hope not! You hope wrong. Somehow SuSE 9.1 manages to always mount the same device to the same directory, so one can create desktop icons, but I haven't investigated how it works. It just does. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
