LinuxQuestions.org - USB jumpdrive/ USB hud-card reader issues

ok....
heres the deal(bare with me i have to type a lot). as you can see by my screen name.... im a newbie. so i really dont know my way around yet, and i have a problem. ok... for some reason my USB drives on my motherboard dont seeem to be working correctly. heres the how it goes.... i WAS using a laptop with mandrake 9.2. and for the most part everything worked fine. till the hard drive died on me. now using that i would plug my jump drive in... and boom. no problem. i never had to configure a thing. it just recognized it right off the bat. but when the hard drive died.... i decided it was time to build myself a box. so i did just that. bought all the parts and chassis and everything. put it all together... and installed madrake 9.2 just as before... only this time the USB ports on the motherboard were acting sort of funny. for instance... at install it wouldnt recognize the USB mouse i was using.... so i had to switch back to a PS2 mouse for that. but after everything was installed.... i hooked it up and it worked. strangely though i sometimes have to unplug it and plug it back in after reboot and restart X before it will work again. and the second thing is... that i cant seem to be able to use my jump drive or USB thumb drive as some people know it, or the memory card reader/ USB hub i have. now it could very well be the drivers in the BIOS but im not sure. i tried installing those with the cd that came with the motherboard when i bought it.... but it didnt really do much. it just gave me some sort of error about not booting from the cdrom. im not sure what it was because i just decided to install 9.2 anyway. and everything works fine eth0, keyboard, printer, most everything EXCEPT the USB. i have no clue where to begin. i tried as ROOT to use " mount /mnt/removable " but no dice. it just gave me a error about the fstab. so im out of ideas now.... and i know im babbling now but i havent slept so im a little out of it. ive been trying to figure this out all night. but anyway... could someone please help? and remember i am new.... so try to walk me through it as in depth as you can. and oh... sometimes my sound out of my speakers comes out like static when im logging into and out of KDE. but inside everything usually sounds fine with the games and movie clips and stuff. any clues on that? anyway... please help. i really need to be able to use the card reader and thumb drive.

thank you very much in advace.