@Higgsboson: I think you've completely misunderstood the OP's problem. It is not about putting an OS on USB flash memory, but rather that the device does not appear to be registered on the USB subsystem, (although this may be to do wit the privileges required for 'lsusb' to report the necessary), and they observe nothing reported in the kernel output when the device is first attached.

Dear Higgsboson,

Thanks for joining this thread. YYou may have gotten confused on what my issue is.. I am NOT trying to install Linux on a bootable USB stick. The problem I have is that there are 7 USB ports on my desktop and when I enter command lsusb with a USB stick in a port it does not show up. I have tried several other ports with the same result. Strangely, I have a wireless N adapter in one port that is described in the output, as is a wireless mouse plugged in to another port. To evaluate whether I have a hardware or software prroblem, I put a hard drive containing only Windows XP as an OS and the USB sticks were recognized and described perfectly. To me, this says I have a software not a hardware problem when I put the hard drive containing Linux Mint back in the desktop. I'm beginning to wonder when I installed Linux whether the act of putting several partitions on the clean hard drive somehow affected the showing of USB sticks.

Instead of accepting the default Linux install which puts only two partitions, a main partition and a swap partition, on the hard drive, I instead choose the install option called "do something else." This allowed me to create my own partitions and I created a /boot partion, / partition (root), /home, and swap partitions in that order. I can't see that there is anything erroneous about this.

Cheerio

Did the sandisk stick work or is no usb sticks working? What is the ouput of lsmod? and lspci and lsusb

No, that has no relevance to the issue with the usb hardware.

Now, please check what is reported by 'sudo lsusb' and 'sudo usb-devices' (with the usb flash memory stick attached) as requested previously.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

And the funny thing is, I don't think you do either.

I would agree.
Since you have a new Mint install, it's possible that the default packages are seeing your 2 other USBs but not your problem USB.
You could see if you need to install another driver package for the USB to be detected. But I think colorpurple21859 is addressing that.

I agree. It must be a driver issue.
As Yancek says, is it not appearing under /media either?

You really need to re-read this thread from the top. You mentioned
What does that have to do with getting the device recognised by the kernel. Any USB device (even without device driver support) will be reported by 'lsusb' with the chipset details, as part of the device descriptor.

http://www.beyondlogic.org/usbnutshe...iceDescriptors

I have a reasonable understanding of the USB subsystem, and I can categorically tell you that a working device should be registered upon attachment and 'lsusb' should display the chipset details. That is fundamental to the device being able to be handled in the first place.

It did not get enumerated, and it didn't show up in the 'usb-devices' output as expected. (A supported device will be reported with the corresponding device driver bound to it, eg 'usb-storage' for memory sticks as you can check for yourself).

Sandisk have configured some flash drives to be detected as hard drives for Win8 certification.http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...0-9a1238c77310
This suggests problems may occur with Sandisk.
I couldn't get Win7 to see my Sandisk as a removable disk.
Also, the Unetbootin program on a linux system doesn't function properly when writing a .iso to the Sandisk usb.

Having said that, the usb does appear under 'lsusb' when I put it into a usb port.

This isn't the original poster's problem at all. (S)he already has Mint installed. The problem is that (s)he wants to use a USB flash drive, and Mint fails to recognize it.

EDIT: Whoops, looks like I forgot to check if there was another page of replies...

None of this is relevant to why the device is not being annunciated by the kernel.

Yep, that's fundamental information related to how USB devices communicate with a host controller, which then communicates with the kernel 'usbcore' driver about the attached hardware. This is all done regardless of the device and does not involve any device-specific driver - that comes later in the sequence of events. (So even if the device is not supported, it will still be annunciated with it's chipset at the very least.) So, it is not yet clear why the device chipset is not reported by 'lsusb'. (It's almost as if the device is not being powered up when connected.)

what is the output of from plugging in the usb before turning on the computer. It wouldn't happen to be a usb3 stick in a usb2 port or vice a versa?

The OP mentioned that the devices are USB 2 (refer post #13). The host controllers reported in the 'usb-devices' output (post #8) are a mixture of UHCI and EHCI chipsets. However, the OP also claims that when running Windows with same machine, then the memory stick does work. I agree that it would be a good idea to attach the flash memory at boot, and observe the behaviour.