Using Elan's U111-M SRAM and ATA Flash PCMCIA PC Card Drive with Unix-like Systems [first draft]

EverythingHerePlus.com announces a first draft of a document which outlines the use of the BSD and Linux compatible USB reader for PCMCIA PC Card SRAM and ATA Flash memory devices. While the draft isn't complete, experienced users will have no problems using the command line instructions to complete tasks.

Elan's U111-M PCMCIA PC Card reader for SRAM and ATA Flash memory devices is unique in that the reader itself brokers all the interfacing with the PC Card and presents itself to the host computer as a USB mass storage device. In addition to working on The Windows platforms, the device works with various versions of BSDs and Linux. Because of this, the U111-M allows users of Unix-like platforms to perform actions on these cards using common command line tools that usually require specialized and expensive software for The Windows. EverythingHerePlus hopes the document will be helpful to those wanting to deploy the U111-M with Unix-like systems.

Table of Contents
Introduction
Operating Systems uname -a results
Plugging in PC Card SRAM or ATA Flash
PC Card Partition Information
Mounting PC Card SRAM or ATA Flash
Unmount PC Card SRAM or ATA Flash
Formatting/Erasing PC Card SRAM or ATA Flash
Binary Image File to PC Card SRAM or ATA Flash
Binary Notes
Comparing Binary to PC Card SRAM
Manual Checksums Binary vs. PC Card SRAM or ATA Flash
View Hexadecimal of PC Card Memory Area (or Binary File Copies)

U111-M Q&A, Compatibility with Mac OS X?

Question: Interested in purchasing the USB to PC card reader/writer but i want to make sure it is compatible with Apple computers and OS X.

Answer: Unfortunately, the U111-M currently doesn't work with Mac OS X as of this writing (January 2010). We've tested it extensively under Linux (Xubuntu Linux 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) amd64 edition), and even discovered viable work-around methods to get the U111M to work with OpenBSD (OpenBSD 4.6 beta i386 edition). However, the way the U111-M presents itself to Mac OS X precludes using even low level commands like diskutil and mount_msdos from Terminal. Mac OS X sees the U111M reader, and even the capacity of the inserted PCMCIA PC Card, but can't read the MBR of the PCMCIA PC Card, and hence is unable to treat it as a filesystem.

We're not sure if this is Elan or Apple's fault, but we're just as disappointed that it doesn't work with the Mac since we're Mac users too. If you have a spare Linux or OpenBSD machine, we can send you instructions for getting the U111M to work with those systems. U111-M also works with Windows 2000, XP 32, Vista 32.

If you have no need to read PCMCIA PC Card SRAM, and just need to read PCMCIA PC Card ATA Flash, we do have two different combinations of products that are well supported under Mac OS X.

PCM-CR-UEMUL03 MotionFlash32 USB 2.0 to 5 Slot Multi-Card Read-Writer 
in conjunction with the
ADP-ATA-CF CompactFlash Type I to 16-bit PC Card Type I/II Adapter for ATA Flash

or

PCM-CR-FW81ECF-02 CFFire800 Pro FireWire 800 to UDMA CompactFlash Drive Read-Writer 
in conjunction with the
ADP-ATA-CF CompactFlash Type I to 16-bit PC Card Type I/II Adapter for ATA Flash

Ordinarily we would recommend the FireWire solution because of overwhelming speed advantages, but ATA Flash PCMCIA PC Cards are so slow (PIO mode 4 -- max), that even USB 2.0 is more than adequate to read and write to them.