Flash memory and External HD doesnt show up

[Dr.Death]

Hi,

when i plug my flash memory, and my external HD on my laptop, it don't respond. it have light on it and it doesnt work.

i have two partitions on my internal HD. XP and Fedora. hda1 , hda2.

i tried mount -t ntfs /dev/hdb1 /mnt
and
mount -t msdos /dev/sda1 /mnt

but nothing happen , its say bad superblock.

how can i know what /dev is used by the flash memory and the external HD, and mount them.

also for the NTFS file system , i read that knoppix have captive on it. i use the latest version of knoppix and i cant found it on it !

thankx alote

sorry for my English

[foamrotreturns]

You probably shouldn't be mounting these devices straight to /mnt. It should have an extension like /mnt/sda1 or /mnt/ntfs or something. Do you seriously have a hard disk formatted for DOS? AFAIK, the only thing close to DOS formatting we have today is vfat, or FAT32. Is that what it's formatted as? if so, change your filesystem type from msdos to vfat.
Captive is not worth working with. It's buggy and it'll probably crash your filesystem. If you have to have a hard disk that can be used by Linux AND Windows XP, use FAT32. It works fine.

[Dr.Death]

Hi foamrotreturns , my flash memory is vfat and my external harddisk is NTFS.

the problem is when i plug them to my laptop they doesnt light on.

i dont think the problem is from the files system , cause they run fine on my Fedora box.

i asked about captive, for a recovery issues. cause it happen to me once , my windows NTFS damaged , and i was trynig to recover it.

i know that writing on NTFS may damage the file system, but i didnt know i may happen also with captive.

thankx