More USB hard drive questions.

The issue I am having is getting the USB hard drive mounted to be used to
either restore or send images to using the zen 7 boot cd.

I've tried following the directions given that were, use mount /dev/sda1
/mnt/harddisk, which does not work. this returns an error. I can't
remember what it was offhand but something to the effect of "block device"
leading me to believe that there was no device to be called by typing
/dev/sda1 because the same error was returned when trying sda2 or sda3.
Either way, I'm trying to figure out what the missing step is here. the
drive is formatted EXT2 and is visible in windows courtesy of a few files
from sourceforge. When booting off of a Knoppix cd the drive is
automatically detected and mounted as sda1.
so whats the problem?