Ubuntu – How to mount an SD card

sd cardstorage

My computer has an SD card slot. When I put a working SD card into the slot, nothing happens. When I put a CD or DVD in, or plug in a USB drive, the medium is mounted and available. Is there something special I need to do for SD cards?

Hardware specifics

I am running 11.10 on a Dell XPS L502X. The card slot is marked "SDXC/MMC – MS/Pro" (which Wikipedia tells me are various SD card types).

Best Answer

I have the same laptop, the slot does work on Ubuntu 12.04, but the OS doesn't seem to find the card when it is inserted. It appears you have 2 options in the short term:

Reboot with the SDcard in the slot.
Do a PCI re-scan
```
echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/bus/pci/rescan
```

The bug with the workaround is listed here.

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At this point I would suggest running badblocks on the SD card to see what it finds.

It sounds like the card's write logic is damaged, what you see on a mount point is simply the cached version of your data. It's supposed to be written back via sync and during umount. Seeing that you don't mention that the SD card is hanging at all suggests the damage is severe enough to create false positive write back responses or in simpler terms your disk is lying to you when it says a write is complete.

You could try toggling the write protect switch while the card is removed from the system. e.g.

toggle write protect
insert
do something trivial
unmount/eject
reverse write protect
rinse/repeat

In an effort to tickle the circuitry which might be caching a "stuck at 1" value. Other than that, crush it so no one else suffers any more grief and toss it.

Ubuntu – Ubuntu won’t mount SD Card

Panasonic cards are formatted using exFAT. To automatically mount exFAT filesystems, install following 2 packages:

$ apt-get install exfat-utils exfat-fuse

Cheers.

Best Answer

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