USB ports will not recognize flash drive

I have a little problem with a customer's Ubuntu.

USB ports won't work, but if I restart the computer, the light on the flash drive starts blinking and I can mount the flash drive.

As you can see here:

guest-HFuyrW@liv-Aspire-1810TZ:~$ lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0 298,1G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0    12G  0 part 
├─sda2   8:2    0     1K  0 part 
├─sda5   8:5    0   3,9G  0 part [SWAP]
├─sda6   8:6    0 158,3G  0 part 
└─sda7   8:7    0 123,9G  0 part /
sdb      8:16   1   496M  0 disk 
└─sdb1   8:17   1   496M  0 part 

now the drive is flashing, still unmounted, but flashing. atleast it got power now.

but when i take it out and plugg it back in it shows:

guest-HFuyrW@liv-Aspire-1810TZ:~$ lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0 298,1G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0    12G  0 part 
├─sda2   8:2    0     1K  0 part 
├─sda5   8:5    0   3,9G  0 part [SWAP]
├─sda6   8:6    0 158,3G  0 part 
└─sda7   8:7    0 123,9G  0 part /

get what I mean now? and I don't know how to get it working, that's where the help is needed. I can't turn the computer off and on again every time I plug a drive in

I'm not used to Ubuntu or Linux.

First, you can try unplugging and plugging the device back in.

Also, i've noticed sometimes the device doesn't mount until I click on the device in thunar (or nautilus). First, open the file manager (nautilus, thunar, whatever) and click on the device icon down on the left to mount the device.

To manually mount a device, open a terminal and type the following commands:

First, list all devices:

lsblk

here's an example of the output

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0 232.9G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0 223.4G  0 part /
├─sda2   8:2    0     1K  0 part 
└─sda5   8:5    0   9.5G  0 part [SWAP]
sdb      8:16   1   3.7G  0 disk 
└─sdb1   8:17   1   3.6G  0 part 
sdc      8:32   1   1.9G  0 disk /media/myawesomeusername/8817-272B
sr0     11:0    1     2K  0 rom  

In this example, we have the hard drive at /dev/sda, an unmounted USB drive at /dev/sdb and a mounted USB drive at /dev/sdc.

To mount the unmounted USB drive at /mnt, we would run the following command:

sudo mount -o rw /dev/sdb1 /mnt

The contents of the drive should now be available in the folder /mnt.

To explain mount mounts the drive, -o rw is for the option read write, /dev/sdb1 is the usb partition we want to mount, and /mnt is the mount point where the contents of the drive will display.

To unmount the drive, either click the eject button or run the following command:

sudo umount /dev/sdb1