Hello altogether,

I´ve experienced something of a mystery; perhaps there´s someone who can help me.

First of all I have to say that I had installed my system (Linux/Lubuntu 16.04 LTS, 64bit) on a USB-Stick (64 GB) and it worked really fine. That was about 9 months ago.

Last week however - very suddenly - nothing worked any more. The system virtually froze and even the famous R E I S U B -command (needed for emergencies like this) didn´t work.
That was odd given the fact that this is implemented within the kernel. So I had to play back my system-backup which I had created with clonezilla 14 days earlier. Of course I wanted to use my USB-Stick again.

Yet the restoration failed due to the fact that clonezilla didn´t recognize the stick in the first place. Up to that point in time that had never been an issue.
Well, I thought there might be an issue with the memory cells of the thumb-drive. They say that the number of times you can read and write to those cells is limited.
On the other side I was of the opinion that my stick should last a bit longer than 9 months, as it was new at the time of installation.

In the meantime I managed to restore my system to an external HDD (WD Elements). That really worked fine. Everything is o.k. now but there´s still the unsolved question as to why clonezilla didn´t recognize my USB-stick.

The thing is however: when connecting that very stick to my Lubuntu, which is running on a PC by the way, (even to Ubuntu 16.4 or WIN7 on my laptop) the thumb drive is recognized as a storage medium.
Furthermore I tried to copy some films (.wmv, .mp4) to the stick and that also went well. They can be played back without any difficulty.

My question is now: Does anybody know why clonezilla can´t recognize my USB-stick any more?
Any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks a lot in advance.

Greetings.
Rosika

P.S:
clonezilla-version: clonezilla-live-20160210-wily-amd64