[CentOS] Video on (video-capable digital) still camera not accessible

Sat May 23 15:38:02 UTC 2009
MHR <mhullrich at gmail.com>

On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 7:33 AM, Michael Kralka
<michael.kralka at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This sounds oddly familiar. Have you reported a similar problem in the
> past?
>
Not I.

> So, if I understand this correctly, you have a CentOS host that is
> having trouble accessing USB connected devices (your camera and SD cards
> plugged into your USB card reader). However, a WinXP guest (running on
> the CentOS host you are having trouble with) has no trouble accessing
> these devices?
>
Nah, too easy.  :-)

This is the _only_ USB device my CentOS host is having trouble with.
In fact, I'm in the process of resurrecting an older machine with some
new hardware, but attempting to preserve the old installed WinXP on it
(yeah, I know...) and I'm using my CentOS host and a universal
PATA/SATA-to-USB connector, on the same ports that don't read the
camera, with great success.

The WinXP VM guest can only see the camera - accessing it crashes the
guest and blows up the VM network configuration.

>> 1) CentOS not seeing either device (camera or SD-in-reader) as mountable
>
> Just a guess. Could it be that VMware is "stealing" this device for
> itself? I am fairly certain VMware can "steal" a device for a virtual
> machine immediately after the USB device is plugged in.
>
Possible, but I've run into that before - as long as I make sure
VMware has the device disconnected before boot and after access
attempts, it won't steal it from the main host.

>> 2) How to mount the SD card manually given that it does not appear to
>> be a vfat (which is how most of these have shown up before IIRC).
>
> I would be very surprised if it is not formatted as a VFAT partition;
> Camera manufacturers have to make devices that use file systems that
> will work on both Windows and MAC, leaving very limited options.
>
> I guess the trick is, determining what device to use. You can always
> look in dmesg to see what the kernel assigned, or if you are lazy like
> me, look at the output of:
>        ls /dev/sd?
> before and after plugging in the device. The new device is the drive
> and /dev/sd?1 will be the partition to mount.
>

Tried all that - no joy.

Thanks, though.

mhr