I've been attempting to get my USB flash drive working with my Debian 3.1 box. Everything seems good until I mount it. The flash drive appears in the output from dmesg and lsusb. When I attempt to mount it with 'mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb-flash' I get 'mount: unrecognized filesystem vfat'

I know I've used 'mount -t vfat ...' with zip disks on my PowerBook running YDL. Does anyone know why Debian isn't working with vfat by default? Is this something I have to enble in the kernel (I'm using one of the precompiled ones from the Debian installer)?

Is it possible that the flash drive is not formatted as FAT32 (or FAT16)?

It's formatted as FAT16. I checked when I was using it with Mac OS X.

Hm. I don't know what the deal is. You can check out this thread--apparently the OP found a solution, but I can't figure out what it is.

are you using a stock kernel? It may be that vfat isn't supported by your kernel. You may need to add a module or something. Other than that...I don't know

I had the exact same problem and it turned out the entry in the fstab file was NOT in sync with what dmesg said about the drive..

fstab said /dev/sdb
dmesg identified it as /dev/sdb1

after I changed fstab to sdb1, the problem when away..

This two cents worth contributed by..
Mr Mike, Houston, Tx

Thanks for the help everyone. It appears that the stock kernel only has support for isofs. I'll probably recompile the kernel tonight or tomorrow with support for at least a few more filesystems (like vfat and hfsplus).