USB stick not being detected.

[sanmk4890]

Hi,
I have this weird problem with my usb drive (Transcend 8 gb). It had been working fine for 2-3 months. But then all of my systems, except one (so weird man!!) stopped detecting this drive. Connecting the usb to these systems has no effect - no /dev file created and nothing shows up in dmesg and lsusb.
And on the one system (out of 5) where it works properly ,lsusb has this output:

Bus 002 Device 007: ID 8564:1000 // As seen here, there is no device name listed
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0020 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 03f0:0024 Hewlett-Packard KU-0316 Keyboard
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 045e:00cb Microsoft Corp. Basic Optical Mouse v2.0
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0020 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

I didn't do anything special with this usb, just using it as normal (data transfer etc). And no, I don't connect my usbs to Windows systems .
I have formatted it , ran fsck but nothing worked.

Is there anything else I should be trying?

Thanks a lot in anticipation,
SMK.

[Rubberman]

Maybe the drive is failing? USB sticks, as do all other flash memory devices, have a limited lifespan, especially with regard to write cycles. They usually have onboard logic to "wear level" the sectors so that they get mapped out of use, so when you rewrite a sector, it may be a different actual physical one since the last time that sector was written. They utilize an LRU algorithm of sorts (least recently and least written to, so more of a LRULW algorithm) to do that, so that the drive overall lasts longer. This is one reason why we recommend flash/thumb drives to be read-mostly devices. Putting swap or other highly volatile data on a thumb drive, which will be fast at first, will degrade and finally start failing. This has happened to me, in that I had to dump some of these devices over time.