[tlug] Micro-SD Card Throws Me A Curve Ball

[Dave M G <martin@example.com>]

TLUG,

As mentioned in a few other threads, I have an SD card reader that was 
working before, but didn't work so well after upgrading to Ubuntu Feisty.

The short story of the problem is that when I insert an SD card, what I 
want to happen is for an icon representing that card to appear on my 
desktop. That's what happened with Dapper and Edgy. But with Feisty, no 
icon appeared when I put in an SD card.

I can mount the SD card with the "pmount" command, but that's kind of a 
clunky way of doing things for a GUI type of guy like me.

Anyway, after some poking and prodding with various commands and looking 
around various web pages, I came to the conclusion that this was a 
Feisty bug. Something was wrong with Feisty's handling of how the USB 
card reader auto-mounted an SD card. I resigned myself to the fact that 
I was probably going to have to settle for using "pmount" until a bug 
fix was issued.

But it turns out that this might not be the case.

My girlfriend's keitai uses a micro-SD card for storing pictures. The 
other day, she wanted to copy some pictures from her camera to her 
computer. I have an external SD card reader that attaches by USB. The 
micro-SD card comes with an adapter so that it can be placed into 
regular sized SD card reader slots. I  put it all together on her laptop 
and expected to have to mount the card with "pmount".

To my surprise, it auto mounted and an icon appeared on her desktop. Weird.

So, after copying her pictures for her, I took her micro-SD and tried it 
out on my desktop machine's internal SD card reader. And it worked there 
too. An icon automatically appeared on my desktop.

Just to confirm I wasn't going nuts, I put in one of my regular SD 
cards, and no icon appeared. I had a couple other regular sized SD cards 
- I own 3 in total - and non of them worked.

Now I'm totally confused. What would be the difference between a 
micro-SD card and a regular sized SD card that could account for this 
difference in behavior?

Is it that my regular sized SD cards are formatted on my Palm Pilot (I 
think with FAT-16, maybe FAT-32)? What would her micro-SD be formatted as?

What would you suggest I do to test the differences between the two 
cards? I tried looking at dmesg output, but they look exactly the same 
so far as I can tell (both mount on sdd1).

Any advice much appreciated.

--
Dave M G
Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn
Kernel 2.6.20-15-generic
Pentium D Dual Core Processor