[PLUG] SD cards always mount read-only

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 11 Oct 2011 09:01:49 -0700
John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> dijo:

>It would be interesting to try it in laptops running other distros.
>However, I did try live CDs of Lucid and Knoppix with and it was always
>read-only. And my GRML rescue CD also saw it as read-only.
>
>By the end of the day I hope to know how it mounts on a Windows
>laptop.

So today I went to PSU for class and took the SD card with me to see
what happened on Windows computers. First I went to the graduate
computer lab in the basement of Smith. They have some <very nice> Macs
which have an SD card reader built in, whereas for the Windows
computers you need to go to the support desk and check out a USB SD
card reader. I opted for the Mac.

The Mac mounted it automatically, and it was read-write. So (after
fumbling around the Mac GUI) I found a utility to reformat it.
Unfortunately, the only choices were several different Mac filesystem
formats plus "FAT (MSDOS)." It didn't even say what flavor of FAT, nor
did it have any option to make it bootable or other choices. I went
ahead and formatted it FAT, and it finished without incident.

I had to go to class, but later I came back and tried the USB SD card
reader with a Windows computer. This offered me FAT16, FAT32, NTFS and
something else (forgot). I decided to format it NTFS just because I
thought that it might be more likely wipe any evil stuff that SanDisk
had put on the device. It finished the formatting without incident.

I was unable to find any Linux computers on campus that I had access
to. Not being a computer science major I am not allowed to use
computers in the CS department.

I am now home. I put the card into my Fedora 14 Thinkpad and got it
recognized, even though it was NTFS. Using Gparted I attempted to
format it, but I got the same error message as before: The device is
read-only.

There remain three possibilities:

	1) The card reader in the Thinkpad is flaky
	2) The adapter is flaky.
	3) Linux is flaky.

Further testing will require finding a Linux computer that has an SD
card slot (capable of > 4GB), and that is -Thinkpad, -Fedora. In the
meantime, does anyone else have an SD card that is working in a Linux
computer?