My new computer runs Slack10.1, almost everything seems to work properly, but something's wrong and I can't understand why.

This is annoying me 'coz the whole system should be up.

The USB removable storage system is one of those stuff.

The situation is:
1) there's a SATA hard disk recognized as /dev/sda;
2) using dmesg I found out that the USB port I'd like to use is recognized as /dev/sdb1;
3) fstab shows the following line in order to load USB pendrive:
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/pendrive vfat noauto,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,umask=000,rw,exec 0 0;
4) the specified error comes up if the filesystem is set as "vfat" either set as "auto".

That's all, folks.

Thanks in advance for your help, see ya.

your usb-port can't be recond as sdb1 cause sdb1 is a partition of a serial or scsi device...
try mounting it strictly as sdb, not sdb1

I gonna try that, but with my previous pc I set the usb port as /dev/sda1 and it worked with no problem.
Let's see if you're right.

I was just having the same problem getting the "not a valid block device" error when trying to mount my camera(Olympus C-740 Ultra Zoom). By switching to another usb port it allowed me the mount the camera for some reason. It was on a HP pavilion zt1135 running Debian Sarge.

I forgot this thread, but I've already solved my problem:
I had to activate an appropriate module and it worked correctly then.

which one?

I don't remember exactly the name, anyway it's really easy to find.

Look at the USB section of the file "/etc/rc.d/rc.modules", you'll find a line telling you the module beneath is designed to be used with "USB mass storage systems".

Delete the "#" in order to activate the module and reboot your Slack.
Be sure to do all I told you being the administrator, otherwise you'll not be able to edit the rc.modules file.

See ya.

Now it works, gugle helped me.
Added in fstab this row:
/dev/uba1 /mnt/usb auto noatime,rw,users,exec,uid=1000,gid=100 0 0

and now I can mount it with:
mount /dev/uba1

Regards,
Daniel

You were supposed to have already edited correctly fstab, in fact I got trouble even though fstab was set in the right way.

The configuration of fstab may vary anyway, mine's different for example.
I suspcet yours imply that users can read from the device but can't write on it, be careful.