Some days ago I posted a question regarding making a flash drive work under RH9, along with info I found on the web, the concensus seemed to be approximately this
mkdir thumb (or whatever)
mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/thumb

This gives me the error
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1, or too many file systems.

A linux oriented friend suggested that the flash drive may have multiple file systems on it to allow use by Macs as well as windows. So I reformatted the flash drive with fat32. But the result was the same. So I played with it and got it to work by removing the '1' in 'sda1'

ie. mount -t vfat /dev/sda /mnt/thumb

Question: is what I have done wrong because it doesn't follow the format everybody said it should, have I upset something else in the chain(maybe my computer will blow up next time I try to use the flash drive )
Or have they simply upgraded the kernel to not require the '1'