I have an HD install and can't seem to get a usb device recognized on the system. On boot, I see in the text that scrolls by that /dev/sda1 filesystem is not recognized. The device happens to be a ScanDisk compact flash card reader and I can see the LED on the device is off, despite booting with the it plugged in. I've tried it with other usb devices too.

When I 'lsmod', the only references to usb are:
usb-storage
usbcore
Should there be other entries here?

When I try to mount the device, I get the error 'not a valid block device.

I searched up and down google and can't come up with anything. Any ideas? Thanks.

Rob