[CentOS] CentOS 6 mount of ntfs formatted usb stick fails

Tue Apr 15 01:06:52 UTC 2014
Rob Kampen <rkampen at kampensonline.com>

I recently received an 8GB usb stick that fails to mount on my fully 
patched CentOS 6.5 desktop machine.

The stick works just fine on a windoze 7 laptop (my daughter's) with no 
special drivers installed.

fdisk -l /dev/sdf gives the following:
Disk /dev/sdf: 8004 MB, 8004829184 bytes
102 heads, 38 sectors/track, 4033 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 3876 * 512 = 1984512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xc3072e18

    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id System
/dev/sdf1               3        4034     7813184    7 HPFS/NTFS

mount -t ntfs /dev/sdf1 /mnt/usb gives:
NTFS signature is missing.
Failed to mount '/dev/sdf1': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/sdf1' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS.
Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a
partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?

as does mount -t ntfs /dev/sdf /mnt/usb
NTFS signature is missing.
Failed to mount '/dev/sdf': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/sdf' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS.
Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a
partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?

I have the following installed:
ntfs-3g-2011.4.12-5.el6.x86_64
ntfsprogs-2011.4.12-5.el6.x86_64

Has there been a change to the NTFS system with the advent of windoze 
8.0/8.1??
Any help appreciated.
TIA Rob