I have a USB flash drive that previously worked with my main PC running Ubuntu 18.04. A couple of days ago the flash drive is no longer visible in the Ubuntu OS. However, the flash drive still works perfectly on other computers, including another PC running Ubuntu 16.04 and Windows.

My main PC can still recognise other USB flash drives, just not that specific drive that I use (it is a mSATA drive boxed up with a usb connector).

I've tried:

1. lsusb, lsblk - no signs of the device visible on my main PC at all
2. Tried different USB cables and different USB ports on on the same PC.
3. Rebooting the computer

Any idea why is this happening? Is it just that my PC and that particular USB drive hate each other?

lsusb | grep UART

returns:

Bus 001 Device 006: ID 10c4:ea60 Cygnal Integrated Products, Inc.
CP210x UART Bridge / myAVR mySmartUSB light

How can I confirm that the device is at: /dev/ttyUSB0 without unplugging the USB device?

ls /dev/tty* | grep USB

returns /dev/ttyUSB0 only when the device is plugged in, which seems to confirm the USB port location. I am seeking a confirmation process does not involve unplugging the USB device.

Update:

the USB device is not a disk: it is a ESP32 microcontroller

I Have Intentions To Switch To Ubuntu Full Time.I Tried Ubuntu In VM And It Could Not Detect The Fingerprint when i tried lsusb is this only in vm or is there drivers for goodfix fingerprint.

Edit: I tried fingerprint gui still not detected

I purchased a usb wifi adapter that doesn't work or show up in lsusb. Here are the possible reasons I can think of why it wouldn't show up in lsusb:

1. The usb port is broken
2. The device is broken
3. There's something wrong with lsusb

Are there any other possibilities?

I've tested all my USB ports, and they are not at fault. I've also tried it on two computers with the same results. It seems unlikely that lsusb would fail. Unless there is another possible source of error, I must assume that the adapter itself is broken.

edit: the device shows up in Windows device manager, although I'm not able to install the driver. This suggest that the device isn't actually broken, which is even more confusing.

I don't know if this is normal or not but I have an android device connected via USB

In the charge-only mode the output of the lsusb command shows the vendor/product id as

0bb4:0ca3

But when I enable usb tethering on the android device, the output of lsusb now shows the product id has changed to

0bb4:0ffe

Is this normal for the id of a device to change? Maybe the connection settings for the android display a different id for each setting?