How to determine what drives are recognized by LiveCD?
 

I am currently using a Ubuntu LiveCD. The system I have has 2 SCSI hard drives and 2 IDE CDROM drives. When I attempted to mount /dev/sda1 it wouldn't work.

How can I get a list of which items in the /dev directory have been recognized?

Kinda a mixed question there, but have you tried reading /var/log/dmesg if it exists?
Also, what happens exactly when you try to mount /dev/sda1 ? What sort of 'it wouldn't work' are we talking here?
The 'mount' command with no arguments will tell you what's mounted, though with a liveCD it's usually a long list of loops and other stuff which doesn't generally tell you much about the hardware....
If Ubuntu has the 'lshw' command, it would identify the known drives/devices.