smart media card reader problem

[Richard Lyons <richard@the-place.net>]

This is puzzling me.  I have used smart media cards from my olympus 
camera not only to read in photos, but also to transfer data.  THe card 
reader is a cheap and simple "PCline" blue thing plugged into the USB.  
All well and good.  Then I tried a "disgo" - but got   
   mount: /dev/sda1 is not a valid block device
Meanwhile a different camera has SD cards.  So I got the equivalent 
reader for SD cards.  They also work fine.  Still no problem.

Now I plug in the smart media card reader again, and suddenly all the 
cards that I have used only two weeks ago are unreadable. They all give
   mount: /dev/sda1 is not a valid block device

Seems to me that one of four things can have caused this.

 1 The smart card reader has coincidentally gone wrong just when it 
   was not used for two weeks.

 2 The "disgo" somehow caused a change of setup or hardware somewhere.

 3 The SD card reader somehow caused a change. (It still works, so
   the hardware and cable would seemm to be ok)

 4 The latest update I did to sid during this period has altered the 
   modules so that they can only read SD and not smart media.  

Or what?...

Any insights, please.

-- 
richard