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Viewing Treo’s SD card under Linux

Today I ran into an interesting problem with my Treo 600 and Redhat’s Fedora Core 2 Linux. I was trying to transfer something over to the external SD card in the Treo. A few days ago I got the external SD card reader to work after some fidgeting, but today I happen to be trying out a trial version of a program called Card Export II. What this program does is that is presents the inserted SD card as a USB drive to the OS, just like a flash drive allowing regular OS tools to read and write to it. At the same time, it also avoids the speed problems that regular Palm Desktop process has for SD cards on Windows. The question is how to get to work this under Linux. It is also convient that I do not have to take out the SD card from the Treo.

The first thing I tried is simply running the program on the Treo while watching dmesg and the system log on Linux. This is what I got:

usb 1-1.3: new full speed USB device using address 15
Initializing USB Mass Storage driver…
usb-storage: probe of 1-1.3:1.0 failed with error -1
usbcore: registered new driver usb-storage
USB Mass Storage support registered.

The kernel driver loaded correctly, but the probe of the device failed. So the next thing I did, is unload and reload the usb-storage modules:

/sbin/rmmod usb-storage
/sbin/modprobe usb-storage

Checking dmesg again I saw that it worked:

Initializing USB Mass Storage driver…
scsi1 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Vendor: Softick Model: Card Export Rev: 0001
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
SCSI device sda: 246016 512-byte hdwr sectors (126 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: Mode Sense: 00 00 00 00
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
sda: sda1
Attached scsi removable disk sda at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
Attached scsi generic sg0 at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0, type 0
USB Mass Storage device found at 18
usbcore: registered new driver usb-storage
USB Mass Storage support registered.

The only thing that remained is mounting. For that, I ran across a message written by Justus H. Piater on the Jpilot mailing list with a ready-made shell script. I modified the shell script and it seems to be working fine now. The key line is this:

mount -t vfat -o dmask=077,fmask=177,sync /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive

The modified copy of the shell script can be downloaded here. I might make a hotplug and automount scripts for this as well when I have the time.

Tags: fedora, Linux, treo —

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