Filesystems, Disks and Memory

I'm trying to mount a USB Lacie external hardrive in my Linux system but am having trouble doing so, I'm also having trouble mounting my USB ZIP 250 drive.
It is totally me being stupid, but I'm new to unix and am having a few teathing problems.
the command I'm using is the following mount /dev/sda /mnt/ZIP & mount /dev/sdb /mnt/Lacie.
I have created the mount points in /mnt and the file system used on those drives is FAT32, is FAT32 compatible with Linux.
I'm running Suse 7.1.
please don't be afraid of giving me complex commands, I'm used to using DOS and Windows. Like DOS hate windows, but hey that's why I'm converting to Linux

You may need to specify to the mount command which filesystem you're mounting, in the case of mounting FAT volumes. If I recall correctly, the command would be something like "mount -t msdos /dev/blah /mnt/my_blah". Check the man page to be sure...

And I'm not sure is /dev/sd* is right for a USB device, although I've never tried mounting one myself. Typically, Linux systems use /dev/sd* for SCSI and /dev/hd* for IDE drives. What you can do is use the "dmesg" command in Linux to get a replay of the bootup messages, then read at your leisure:
dmesg | less
Look for a reference to your ZIP drive (assuming it was plugged in when you booted) - it should mention the device name with it.

If you can't find it in the dmesg output, post back, and we'll look a few other places...

I was just looking around a little, and saw that there is little, if any, support for USB storage devices in the 2.2.* kernel tree...
What kernel do you have? You can find out by running the command:
uname -r

I've tried this, it gives me "wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda, or too many mounted file systems"
which I think is strange, I've also tried fatfs fat16 fat32, each of which seems strange.
when specifying the device /dev/sda it does access the USB ZIP drive as the drive lights up and you can hear it accessing the device. also in the xconsole window it tells me that it has found the device and gives me "SCSI device sdb: 39070080 512-byte hdrw sectors (20004 MB) which is my Lacie drive, it seems to know what it is as it seems to know that it is 20 Gig, which is correct. it is also the only 20 gig device on this machine so I know it's definitly finding My lacie.
I have no SCSI devices in this particular system so it seems that USB devices are accessed as sda: sdb: sdc and so on for each device
uname returns the result 2.4.0-4GB.
I'm going to try and mount a clean drive by formating it in Linux and hopefully it will access it correctly then, at least then I will know that my system can actually write to this device, even though I won't then be able to access this device on Windows XP

Ahh, it you're using it in WinXP, it may be a NTFS filesystem.
Linux system can read NTFS, but it will damage the filesystem if you write to it (which you can't do by default, since it is dangerous).
Try "mount -t ntfs -o ro /dev/sda1 /mnt/ZIP". You might play with it a bit, like using /dev/sda or /dev/sda1 (for first partition), or trying without specifying a filesystem (see it is figure it out for you). I've also has luck using umsdos, and msdos as a filesystem type.

Post back and let us know if you find anything out...