Memorex memory stick problem

[dbarker@turing.cs.camosun.bc.ca]

I just bought a 1GB Memorex Travelstick and am having difficulty using it.

I'm running testing and everything seems OK at first:  I get the
kernel messages telling me that the stick is recognised, gives me the
vendor and suchlike, tells me that SCSI device sda has 2007040 51-12
byte hdwr sectors but then a little later I get sda: READ CAPACITY
failed, sad: status=0, message=00 etc sda: sense not available then a
Buffer I/O error on device sda logical block 0 adn then unable to read
partition table.

And when I try to fdisk /dev/sda I get unable to open.

FWIW usbfs is mounted on /proc/bus/usbfs

On one boot I found the /proc/scsui/usb-storage/1 file with the
details of the device but after another boot that file is no longer
present.

Anyone any ideas? Am I missing something very obvious?
-- 
|Deryk Barker, Computer Science Dept. | Music does not have to be understood|
|Camosun College, Victoria, BC, Canada| It has to be listened to.           |
|email: dbarker@camosun.bc.ca         |                                     |
|phone: +1 250 370 4452               |         Hermann Scherchen.          |