[ale] Bricked a usb stick?

[Jim Lynch]

I was preparing a PNY 4 Gb usb drive as a bootable Linux drive.  It 
wouldn't boot reliably on an old Dell OptiPlex computer so I 
repartitioned it and made a 2 Gb fat 16 partition on it.  That worked 
fine.  I then used unetbootin to create a bootable drive.  No errors.  I 
booted the computer and it didn't find the drive.  I then plugged it 
into a running system and got the following from dmesg:

[5269333.709170] sd 30:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0
[5269333.718771] sd 30:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI removable disk
[5269369.349249] usb 1-8: USB disconnect, address 19
[5269379.580344] usb 1-7: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and 
address 20
[5269379.732967] usb 1-7: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[5269379.735289] scsi31 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[5269379.736431] usb-storage: device found at 20
[5269379.736440] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
[5269384.731600] usb-storage: device scan complete
[5269384.733097] scsi 31:0:0:0: Direct-Access     XXXXXXXX 
U167CONTROLLER   0.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
[5269384.738849] sd 31:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0
[5269384.749740] sd 31:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI removable disk
[5269390.304767] usb 1-7: USB disconnect, address 20

Even though it mentions sdd there is no /dev/sdd.  I tried it in two 
other systems, running Ubuntu and  Centos and none of the systems 
detected a device.

Is there a way I can recover this thing?  It's almost new.  Since it 
never appears as a device, I can't dd or fdisk it.

Jim.