sorry, i made a mistake.
Besides usb support and usb mass storage support,
there should exist scsi disk support in the scsi menu.
have you ever checked it?
well, check everything related to usb and filesystem.
I once met the problem without scsi support.
i wonder why you do not load one config from linux-src/configs?
use make xconfig,
there is a button "load from file" on the dialog.
push it and specify a config file, for example
, linux-src/configs/config-2.4.20-athlon