USB booting :: cannot mount usb drive, cannot install

hopefully someone can help me out. i wish to perform a pendrive HDD install from a dsl live cd. i have a usb thumbdrive with one 976mb fat32 partition. my first problem is i cannot get the usb drive mounted.

the way i think it should work is i plug the usb drive in, it shows up as sda1 in the mount manager underneath the cpu stats thingy, i click the squigly line and it turns green, i right click the desktop choose tools - install dsl to pendrive - HDD, and follow on screen instructions.

when i plug in my usb drive it never shows up in the mount manager. using Emelfm i cannot find anything that says sda(1,2,3...) in /dev or /mnt, although there is a /pendrive file in /mnt.

because i cannot mount my usb drive i have not even made it to the installation part. am i missing something, why isn't this working?

thank you for your time.

Try plugging it in before bootup.

Also, look at your dmesg output, either from the command line, or from running the "System Stats" program in the DSL Right-Click menu.

original here.