So I've been looking at the walkthroughs that people give in response to other people's problems, trying to work through mine and get my pen drive working, but I can't make any progress whatsoever.

My drive doesn't show up in:
cdrecord -scanbus
fdisk -l

It does show up in:
lsusb
usbview

My problem seems to be at the start of it all:
dmesg output:

sda: Unit Not Ready, sense:
Info fld=0xa00 (nonstd), Current 00:00: sense key Not Ready
sda : READ CAPACITY failed.
sda : status = 1, message = 00, host = 0, driver = 08
Info fld=0xa00 (nonstd), Current sd00:00: sense key Not Ready
sda : block size assumed to be 512 bytes, disk size 1GB.
sda: test WP failed, assume Write Enabled
sda: I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0
I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0
unable to read partition table

Any clue what I can do?

What is the make and model of the pen drive? Some work better than others.

It's a Cig@r drive, 128mb.

Did you load sd_mod and usb-storage.

Is it new or did you put a partition table on it in Windows and format it.

dah! What model or brand. Be specific.

I've tried partitioning it with both FAT and FAT32 under windows and can't get linux to recognize it so that I can partition it with ext2 or ext3. As for model/brand, I would tell you if I could. It's about a year and a half old, pretty basic. *shrug*

And to my knowledge both modules were loaded when I've been attempting things.