[ale] mounting an SD card

[Jim Philips]

I'm trying to mount an SD card I bought for a new camera. I find my card 
reader in dmesg, like so:

usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
  Vendor: Generic   Model: USB SD Reader     Rev: 1.00
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 00
sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sda

But if I try to mount it, I get:

bash-3.1# mount /dev/sda -t vfat /mnt/sd
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda,
       missing codepage or other error
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so

The tail from dmesg looks like this:

sda: assuming drive cache: write through
SCSI device sda: 1000448 512-byte hdwr sectors (512 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
 sda: sda1
FAT: bogus number of reserved sectors
VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev sda.
FAT: bogus number of reserved sectors
VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev sda.

What's happening? What do I need to tell it?