OK....I know this has come up time and time again.....

I am completely new to this and I have searched and searched through plenty of forums but I cannot resolve this problem.

I have a Compact Flash Reader connected via USB. I am running Red Hat 8.0 and it is only a recent installation (as I try to come to grips with it). I am upto date on all of the upgrades available from Red Hat.

I have created a directory in the mnt folder as FLASH and entered the following line '/dev/sda1 /mnt/flash vfat noauto,user,fat=12 0 0' into the fstab file.

When I attempt to mount the drive I get the following errors 'mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1, or too many mounted file systems' OR 'mount: /dev/sda1 is not a valid block device'.

I have read in some threads that that messages sometimes indicated no media in the reader - I can assure you there is! The Compact Flash card is a 32MB card from a camera and should therefore I guess be FAT.

As far as I can tell I have the correct USB / SCSI modules loaded.

Help please....this is driving me insane! Thanks.

Is the flash card formated? If not you will have to format it before you mount it.

I'm not sure why you use fat=12 in your options to mount, but it's usually unnecessary because mount will probe for the correct parameters. Also, I always use msdos as the filesystem type because that's actually what my camera formats the card as.

I've noticed that with my USB Compact Flash card reader, I need to try a couple of times because the USB timeout is too low and the device doesn't respond in a reasonable amount of time. There is an option you an give to the kernel that will allow you to give USB a long time out, but that requires a recompile of the kernel (even with this option turned on, the device is still too slow).
Another problem may be your /dev directory. Depending on whether RH starts up with devfs enabled or not (anyone?), you may have to make /dev/sda and /dev/sda1. If devfs is not enabled, you'll have to do something like the following (assuming the special files don't already exist; ls -l /dev/sda*):
However, if devfs is enabled, this is unnecessary and the files will disappear on the next boot.