I have been using a usb drive, but it has stopped working.I have tried changing it to another usb port still doesnt work. I tried reformating it with gparted. When I run lsusb it shows the drive. It also appears in gparted as Sdb. it still wont show up in the files app.I am using mint 20 cinnamon. What am I not seeing. any help is appreciated.I have exhausted my patience with googling the problem. Most of the answers are for windows machines.

All USB flash drives will fail eventually due to exceeding their number of write cycles. I've had several fail and their failure mode is sometimes not being recognized, being recognized but not the filesystem or as read only. I have physically abused a few by accident and some of them have failed. Basically you are out of luck, buy a new flash drive.

If the drive is a physical hard drive and not flash it could be either something mechanical or the electronics. While depending on manufacture you might be able to extract the drive and be able to plug directly into a SATA connector but now days the USB bridge connects directly to the electronics board so it isn't as easy to recover files or put into anouther case as it once was. SMART may or may not work across the USB bridge and so makes it difficult to discover if it has really failed. Not much you can do either.

It won't until there's a partition and a valid filesystem on it.
Have you done that, too, with gparted?
Maybe show us

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It's possible the drive just isn't being automounted by the system. Have you tried mounting it manually?

Yes this will be important information to help with the current status.Is this a situation where you'll want to recover information? Or a situation where the drive formerly worked fine, but for some reason it does not? Just trying to figure out if this was a drive you've been using actively and then it stopped working, for some reason, versus it was a drive which you've used with Linux before and for some reason it didn't work properly now that you've tried to use it again?

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as requested here is the out put from fdisk -l /dev/sdb

charles@charleslatitude-E6440:~$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb
[sudo] password for charles:
Disk /dev/sdb: 116.7 GiB, 124623257600 bytes, 243404800 sectors
Disk model: USB Flash Disk
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xa554a83a
charles@charleslatitude-E6440:~$

gparted shows a partion called unallocated which matchs the space on the usb device

never mind i will mark this solved thanks for the direction

The solution came from ondoho who told me it would not show until there was a partition on it. I had a partition showing an unallocated partition that i had not applied yet. Thanks for all thhe kind help