hi everyone. at the moment, i'm trying to mount an external hard drive via usb. as mentioned already, the "fdisk -l" command tells me its there listed as /dev/sda1 but i can't seem to mount it. i wouldn't have gotten this far if i didn't see that command in another post but unfortuntely i simply can't mount it no matter what at the moment. kind of stuck. TIA

What filesystem is on it?

What mount command are you using?

What happens when you try to mount it?

What happens when you try to mount it?

Where is the mount point and are you trying as root?
What does dmesg say about the device?

FS = fat32

mount /dev/sda1
mount: mount point /mnt/sda1 does not exist
(same for "mount /mnt/sda1")

fstab:

# This file is edited by fstab-sync - see 'man fstab-sync' for details
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
# $Header: /home/cvsroot/gentoo-src/rc-scripts/etc/fstab,v 1.14 2003/10/13 20:03:38 azarah Exp $
#
# noatime turns off atimes for increased performance (atimes normally aren't
# needed; notail increases performance of ReiserFS (at the expense of storage
# efficiency). It's safe to drop the noatime options if you want and to
# switch between notail and tail freely.

# <fs> <mountpoint> <type> <opts> <dump/pass>

# NOTE: If your BOOT partition is ReiserFS, add the notail option to opts.
/dev/hda1 /boot ext2 noauto,noatime 1 2
/dev/hda3 / ext3 noatime 0 1
/dev/hda2 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,ro,user 0 0
#/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 auto noauto,user,rw,exec,sync0 0

# NOTE: The next line is critical for boot!
none /proc proc defaults 0 0

# glibc 2.2 and above expects tmpfs to be mounted at /dev/shm for
# POSIX shared memory (shm_open, shm_unlink).
# (tmpfs is a dynamically expandable/shrinkable ramdisk, and will
# use almost no memory if not populated with files)
# Adding the following line to /etc/fstab should take care of this:

none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0

/dev/hdc /media/cdrom auto user,exec,noauto,managed 0 0

You'll need to make the mount point first:
mkdir /mnt/sda1
mount /dev/sda1

ok...here's what happened. mkdir /mnt/sda1 ..ok mount /dev/sda1 ..mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1, or too many mounted file systems

Ok, try specifying the filesystem type:
mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1

yes, sir. that worked. thank you. now is there anyway to automate or update the fstab so that i can simply type "mount /mnt/sda1" in the future?

Just change auto to vfat in /etc/fstab.