Q I was copying files to my thumb drive during my lunch when I realised I was late for work. Without regard for my thumb drive, I unplugged it mid-transfer and ran out. The thumb drive suffered the consequences, and now is not being detected by either my Linux OS or Windows XP. I fear that the drive is probably done for, since an OS has to detect it to reformat it, but I thought I would tap the community brain just in case. Any help would be appreciated.
A If you don't see anything in 'dmesg' when you plug the device in, we would recommend returning it to the place of purchase and obtaining a new one. Possibly removing the card while it was active caused a short, or otherwise obliterated the electronics on the device. While USB is 'Plug and Play', it does require filesystems to be unmounted cleanly and for any processes accessing files on the device to be shutdown. Unfortunately, even Linux isn't smart enough to sync all data in the buffers to disk the instant you start to yank it out of the back of the PC.