"R D S" wrote in message
...
I pulled a pendrive out of our Humax Freesat box, rolled my eyes as usual
at the remove safely error popup.

Plugged it into laptop (Ubuntu) though, heard the usual noise as if it had
been recognised but it isn't visible in files.

Gparted doesn't seem to see it.

Smartmon says "Read device identity failed".

Is it knackered?

Likely. I torrent a lot of movies for people I know
and have recently seen 3 USB sticks die. They are
still visible on the PC I write the movies from but
fail when writing movies to the stick. I did ask
the young kid who is pretty cluey technically
if he was safely removing the sticks and he
said he was but the others in the house are
much more likely to not do that.

Decent brand, Toshiba mostly and bought locally
from major retailers so unlikely to be fakes.