Odd problem mounting CF cards

[Crashdamage]

I've used a Sandisk CF card reader in Linux for years now, but never had this problem. I just bought a new 1G CF card. But when I try to mount it I get this:

 

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

 

I have several other CF cards, all 128MB or less, and all work fine. All the cards, including the new 1G card, work fine under Windoze. So I tried formatting the new 1G card, using Windoze. No good. Hmmm...so I Googled around some and found some entries indicating that adding 'sync' in the appropriate /etc/fstab line sometimes helps with large volumes, so I add that. Still no good.

 

Here's where it really gets strange. On a hunch that maybe Linux wasn't picking up on the newly added 'sync' option in fstab, I go ahead and try to fix it a-la Windoze - reboot, with the new 1G card still in the reader. Note here that I've rebooted before with my other CF cards in the reader and had no problems. A-HA! Now the new 1G card will mount, read/write and everything fine. BUT, now if I try to mount any of my other CF cards, I get the same error message above! Only the 1G card mounts properly now. All the cards still work perfectly under Windoze. I haven't tried, but I'd bet that if I rebooted with one of my smaller cards in the reader, the situation would reverse itself again and the 1G card would fail to mount.

 

I can't figure this one out. I have /dev/sda1setup for mounting/umounting as a user, but trying as root makes no difference anyway. Here's the line in my etc/fstab, which I've used unchanged for 3 years with no trouble (except for the newly added 'sync' entry):

 

/dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 vfat user,uid+501,gid=501,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,sync,codepage=850 0 0

 

Any ideas?