[NTLUG:Discuss] Mounting USB portable drive

[John Thomas]

I'm trying to get a Western Digital USB drive attached to my system 
(RedHat EL 3).

dmesg shows this entry:

Attached scsi disk sdc at scsi5, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SCSI device sdc: 78140160 512-byte hdwr sectors (40008 MB)
 sdc: sdc1

And sure enough, /proc has:

/proc/scsi/usb-storage-0 >ls
5
/proc/scsi/usb-storage-0 >cat 5
   Host scsi5: usb-storage
       Vendor: Western Digital
      Product: External HDD
Serial Number: DEF10A48BBE9
     Protocol: Transparent SCSI
    Transport: Bulk
         GUID: 105807010000def10a48bbe9
     Attached: Yes

So the device is recognized by the system.
But mount -t auto /dev/sdc /mnt/USB returns:
"mount: you must specify the filesystem type"

Attempting to specify several different filesystems gives errors.
Also, if I put a new line in fstab for /dev/sdc, that line disappears 
when I reboot.  Why is the fstab file changed during a boot?   What 
program is doing this, and why?

I know this must be something simple, so I will appreciate any tips.

John Thomas
jathomas at tacni.net