Hi, I hope this has not been posted before, at least I couldn't find
anything to solve it.

I can't mount vfat partitions, I've tried with a USB pendrive, a USB
hard disk and my mustek 3000 camera, whenever I try to mount them
with:

mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb

or whatever combination I could think of I get the error:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1,
or too many mounted file systems

That's a bit weird, since I have formatted with mkfs.vfat those
partitions successfully. I've tried with windows formatted partitions
also, with no luck. I can mount and use them with no problem if I use
ext2 or ext3 formats.

I have support for vfat in the kernel, cat /proc/filesystems shows,
among others:

ext3
ext2
nodev ramfs
msdos
vfat
iso9660

The kernel options are:

#
# DOS/FAT/NT Filesystems
#
CONFIG_FAT_FS=y
CONFIG_MSDOS_FS=y
CONFIG_VFAT_FS=y
CONFIG_FAT_DEFAULT_CODEPAGE=437
CONFIG_FAT_DEFAULT_IOCHARSET="iso8859-1"
CONFIG_NTFS_FS=m
# CONFIG_NTFS_DEBUG is not set
# CONFIG_NTFS_RW is not set

I'm using gentoo linux, kernel 2.6.9, and I have no idea of what
should I do next, usb works, I think I have vfat support, but it
happens me in all the vfat partitions I've tried to mount, no matter
who formatted them.

Thank you in advance
Alberto

Sorry for replying to myself, just kept on working a bit and saw some
things with dmesg, which I should have looked before :P

When trying to mount one of such problematic partitions, I get the next
lines on dmesg:

Unable to load NLS charset cp437
FAT: codepage cp437 not found

After googling a bit I guessed that there was a missing nls_cp437.o to
be built in the kernel, didn't find it on the menu, but there was a
line:

# CONFIG_NLS_CODEPAGE_437 is not set

That is what I'm missing, I guess, so manually set that to 'y',
recompile and reboot...

And it works!

Sorry for the useless posting, it's a bit embarrasing to post and
discover the solution to the problem the very first time you come to
it.

However... how could that line be unset? why it didn't appear on the
kernel menu config?. The solution to the problem, manually editing the
..config file, is not normal.

Well, thanks for your patience folks
Alberto