strange behavior with removable storage

[doctor5]

Hello,

Gentoo generally behaves well for me, but I have a problem with two removable storage devices. One of them is my telephone, a Motorola Defy. When I plug it it, dmesg reports a Motorola MB525, talks about which disk (sdc or sdd depending on which computer I'm using), but doesn't give any info about the partition table, which alwaysI get when I plug in normal usb storage devices, such as flash drives or real (rotating) hard disks. I also get the same error with a built-in Realtek SD/MMC pci card reader (I'm using the rts_pstor staging driver in 3.0.6 on this machine -- a Sony Vaio VPCZ21), and it reports sdc as an attached scsi disk but once again, no partition table.

Strangely enough, I can look at the partition tables of these devices with fdisk

fdisk /dev/sdc

and it reports the partition table is OK and exists. I can then exit fdisk, and when I look at dmesg again, the rest of the information about this particular device exists, and then I can mount it normally.

Something isn't getting picked up when I plug in these two things (the phone via usb and the card reader by inserting an sd card), but it does get picked up after I run fdisk. I can't seem to figure out what the problem is. I found another post where it was suggested that CONFIG_BLOCK_DEV_UB should be turned off, but it is off in the one machine running a 2.639-gentoo-r3, and that option doesn't even exist in 3.0.6 (in the Vaio).

I can use these devices if I run fdisk on them first (so they are sort of useable), but I would really like to be able to plug them in and use them directly.

I don't have to run fdisk on my other storage devices when I plug them, just these two. Is there something I missed in my kernel configuration?

Jonathan