Do you see /dev/mmcblk1p* devices? Do you know whether or not the issue you had was the sensor not working (it which case you would have gotten the messages mentioned in the first post in the kernel logs)? ke-recv might still try to mount/unmount according to the sensor, so you might have to mount it manually then run something that keeps a file/directory open, so it can't be unmounted.
https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=1513639
(...)So you're saying that if we "ls -la /dev/mmcblk*" and all we see are mmcblk0p1, 0p2, etc and not mmcblk1p1, p2, etc then it's a hardware fault, a sensor fault? So we cannot get the N900 to see a memory card unless the hardware itself is fixed? (...)