I'm using Mandrake 9.1. I want to be able to mount a usb stick and use this as a removable drive. I have installed Mandrake sever times on a number of machines - compaq deskpro, hpcompaq d330. Some times the installation does everything for me.
there is an icon on the desktop for a removable drive, the drive automounts just fine as there is a line in the fstab to make this happen.. Makes me happy

On the last few machines all this did not happen, no /dev/sda1, nothing about a removable drive in the fstab.

I found a few posts that tell me how to get the usb stick working, i followed the direction to the letter, but I alway get the error message bad block device sda1.

Any suggestions?
thanks

Just a few suggestions.

Does the USB stick work on any other machine?
Have you tried to access the stick as Root? Maybe only Root has permission.
Can you access the stick in the Command Line Interface? I had that problem once. I could access the device in the CLI but not in Nautilus.
What does dmesg list as your drivers for USB drives: there are two differing drivers once is uhci, which is what I use, and there is another which I don't remember the name of.

Good Luck