Problems mounting USB flash drive

[aleardo@ibilce.unesp.br]

Hi,

I'm trying to mount a USB flash drive (Sandisk MiniCruzer, 256M)
in a Debian box (kernel 2.4.26-1-686) and get a

"mount: /dev/sda1 is not a valid block device"

answer.

I've already tried all fixes that I could find on web, but
no sucess at all.

The same drive works fine on Windows XP, 2000, and Fedora 2
(XP and Fedora on my notebook and 2000 and Fedora on my home
PC).

The fstab file has the line
/dev/sda1 /mnt/thumbdrive vfat defaults,user,noauto 0 0

and the directory /mnt/thumbdrive is rightfully mounted.

What else can I do?

Aleardo