Hoopyfood,

to get an /dev/sda1 do the following:

su
ldmod usb-storage
hotplug usb

Now reboot.

After doing that I had sda1-4 so you should be able to do

mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/flash

but you will likely get the same message I am that the FS is wrong. But maybe not.

Hope that helps.

Anyone else know why I might not be able to mount my sda1?

Well, my CF card reader/write is happily working now.

The answer:

I upgraded to mandrake 9.2 tonight, plugged in the CF card reader in and immediately got a desktop icon in KDE. I popped in a CF card and found much to my delight that I could read and write to it.

From what Ive read, the majority of people having the same problem as I had were using Mandrake 9.1. Looks like 9.2 fixes whatever the problem is -- OT, it is also a lot smoother and more polished release (which is amazing, since 9.1 was already a huge improvement on 9.0, which was already pretty darn good!)

Cheers,
Tim