hi all my newbie here. I have a computer with fedora 5 freshly installed. unfortunately it has a wireless card that does not work. so I am going throught the process of tring to get the ndiswrapper to make it work. I have a usb hard drive that I have had attached to my windows box. I was able to download the driver to this drive. now I have plugged the device (usb drive)into my linux box to try to get the driver. but as a newbie I have no idea as to whether the device (or the usb port for that matter) has been detected or how I would look for it or mount it. help a newbie today...you'll feel good about yourself

I don't know how to do this in a GUI or with any tools, but from the commandline it is not that hard.
When external USB storage devices are plugged in they (or rather the USB agent) generate messages showing they use the "usb-storage" module and are listed as SCSI devices. With that information it's easy to set them up.
For convenience I'll assert you do not run any other USB storage devices and the stick or portable disk wasn't plugged in yet. For any commands below remove the outer quotes. They only serve to keep command words together. So, open a terminal and make yourself the root user (su -).
- Plug in the device.
- Now list USB devices attached: "lsusb". The device should show along with mice and other USB devices. If it isn't listed then something is wrong (obviously).
- Continue and look at what's mounted: "mount|grep /dev/sd". This should be empty, unless something automounted the device or if you have other SCSI(-emulation) devices attached.
- Since your USB mass storage device is the first one attached you can look for kernel messages with "grep sd /var/log/messages" and it should read something like "kernel: Attached scsi removable disk sda at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0", "kernel: SCSI device sda".
- We're nearly there. Look for valid partitions on the device: "fdisk -l /dev/sda|grep ^/dev/sd". If there's only one it'll be called /dev/sda1. Now you can mount it with "mkdir -p /mnt/removable && mount /dev/sda1 -t auto /mnt/removable" and access your data.

* You can automate all of this using "devlabel". For each name in the first column output of fdisk do "devlabel add -d (name here) -s /dev/(short name) --automount; mkdir /mnt/mountpoint; echo -en "/dev/(short name)\t/mnt/mountpoint\t(fstype)\tauto,defaults\n" >> /etc/fstab".

hmmmm I am root and when I do lsusb it says command not found...hmmm

Ahh. OK. Just skip that part.

ok question before I proceed. could my fedora be screwed up? for instance the lsusb command says command not found and I know its a command cause I checked it in my linux in a nutshell book...trying the locate command gives a message bout selinux having a hard link count error which could be a bug in my file system...these are not standard messages I am guessing...should I just download from say linuxiso.org (I got my copy from a book) and reinstall or do I just proceed?

ok question before I proceed. could my fedora be screwed up?
Could be but since we're talking about simply trying to access a storage device the chance your system will be fscked up more after this is smaller than you experiencing Sexual Harassment in the Workplace (the instrumental track by FZ, I mean). You probably have to re-apply SELinux context stuff (or reboot with SELinux disabled) but I'd say just proceed. BTW, this is a good moment to emphasise the importance of making backups of personal stuff...