Usb Flash Drives Not Working On Linux

[paq7512]

I have not a clue what I am doing wrong. My flash drives work fine in Windows on the same machine. But when I plug into linux opensuse 10.3 or Mandriva 2008 they won't mount. If i have the flash drive plugged in while the computer is booting it will work fine. Then booted on the desktop I can view my files. So what I do is unmount, but then plug in it does not work. Maybe a problem with power management? This machine is a IBM M51 8142.
I have tried 2 flash drives neither work.
Clean install won't make them work either, fully updated

[digvijay.gahlot]

After you plug you pen drive. Find the device in dev dir for eg if it is /dev/sdb
Then
# moun -t <your file system type vfat/ntfs-3g> /dev/sdb /mnt
The drive will get mounted on mnt.

Automount might not be working, but during boot process the OS recognizes the pen drive and mounts it.

[paq7512]

I have not a clue how to find where the drive dir is. You said /dev/sdb
and it is a fat drive.

[minthaka]

Could you just post the output from fdisk -l as root user. I hope you didn't change anything in /etc/fstab.
Your system should recognize the USB drives by default. You don't have to do anything.

[paq7512]

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80032038912 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9730 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00074d41

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1019 8185086 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 1020 9730 69971107+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 1020 1528 4088511 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 1529 9730 65882533+ 83 Linux

Yes, I do have the flash drive plugged in, I think it may be a problem with linux trying to be able to turn the power on with my flash drive. Since Windows can see these drives on the same computer.

[minthaka]

Have you tried to format your USB stick? It's like your system didn't recognizes the flash. It's strange, but you should try to format the stick under Windows for fat32. After that repeat the process. You could try to format it with Mandriva Command Center's partitioning tool.