usb thumb drive not working!

hi there, first post for me here.

so here's the deal, i have this usb flash drive (or thumb/pen drive, as you wish), that i've been using on my macbook pro and various PCs, and from a point and on, my mac simply stopped recognizing the drive, that is i plug it in, and it doesn't appear anywhere, not on the finder, desktop etc.

this has already happened to me once again with another usb stick, which after plugging it in a windows Pc, it joined the dark side and never came back to OS X.

the brand of this pen drive, should it matter, is "Gizmo Jr." - whatever, what a name. ;D

i am suspecting that it might have to do something with the usb drive having been formatted on the windows file system, after plugging it in a Pc...would there be a way to reformat it on the OS X file system again ?

anyone got a clue ?
thanks a lot for your time and patience!

My flash drive works on both PC and MAC and nothing formats differently. Do you just unplug it once you're done or do you safely remove it? That can damage if you just unplug it without going to the Safely Remove feature.

no i actually always make sure to "safely remove" it on windows, or "eject" it on OS X, exactly because of the reason you mentioned.

thing is, it used to work on both, but after a point OS X just stopped seeing it...

and just a moment ago, i tried plugging it on a pc, and it didn't work either.

could be broken or something, but i really never dropped it..

I have 5 Flash drives, 2 Memorex, 2 Sandisk and 1 Corsair and all work on my Windows machines and Macs back and forth.

The one Corsair drive for some reason hates the FRONT usb ports on my Dell Workstation and will not show up but works perfectly on the REAR ports! Strange one. I have heard of some cheap and off brand Flash Drives that were picky with certain computers. I would get a different brand and see if that solves it.

sorry to hijack
how do you safley remove a thumb drive?
ive just been taking it out of the usb drive-----oooopppps
what probs could i have done to my computer or thumb drive?
thanks

Usually both Windows and OSX warn you to not remove a Flash drive unless you unmount it. In OSX either drag the drive to the trash and it will eject or right click and click on Eject.

I know a lot of people who ignore the warnings and have had no issues but I also know many who lost all the data on the drive. When the drive is mounted, files are open and yanking it out without ejecting it can corrupt files. Does not always happen but much better not to take a chance.

I once pulled out the USB 2.0 cable on a 80GB external hard drive and the who drive was corrupted. Lost everything. Nothing would repair it. Better safe than sorry!

For your re-formatting question .
Go into Disk Utility and see if your thumb drive shows up.
Select Your USB Flash Drive .
Re-format . by erasing and setting volume format to FAT .
Hope it works .

A MS-DOS FAT formatted drive will work with most but not all Mac files.
There will be problems with the iWork 'package' files which will need to be zipped / compressed first.
For use on Macs Only ~ Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is best.