Disk Utility says of USB Drive - "This partition can't be modified" "This disk is not writeable and cannot be partitioned"

Several months ago I bought a 64GB PNY USB memory stick to transpord data quickly.
It seemed to work fine.  I could format it as a Mac partition and use it.  I hardly ever need
it so I just put it away.
Today I wanted to use it to put a file on and take it to the Kinko's/FedEx to print, and I
find I cannot mount it on any of my computers, iMac, MacMini or MacBookPro.
In Disk Utility virtually everything is greyed out.
Disk Utility says: "This partition can't be modified" "This disk is not writeable and cannot be partitioned"
If I try to mount it, it says "This disk cannot be mounted"
There is no physical read-only switch or setting on the disk that I can see and it is very small.
I has a Mac OS installed on it, so I wonder if that is a problem?  I should be able to write over that
or reformat it I would think.

Thanks for these replies. 
I've got regular time machine backups and just backed up some of my data by copying some key folders to an external drive.  I'm bit paranoid about backup integrity and would ideally like to do another full backup to a different drive using a system other than time machine, in the event that something goes wrong with the time machine backup.  Any recommendations on good and affordable backup software to do a backup of my TM backup?
One other question: I seem to encounter problems like this pretty frequently.  I'd say once a year or so, my drive fails completely or gets near enough to failing that I have to wipe and restore.  (I've never had a TM backup fail to work, though the last go around there were some hiccups which has led to my backup paranoia.)  I've had this happen on multiple computers, so I'm becoming pretty convinced that the problem lies somewhere in my data.  Is it possible (even likely) that there's something in my data causing this recurring problem?  If so, is there anything I might be able to do to try and pinpoint and address this problem?  I'd love to go one year without having to wipe/restore my machine!
For a while I thought I just had bad luck.  But I think this is like the 4th or 5th time this has happened in the past 4 years and every time, I'm restoring from a backup, so I come back with the same data.  It's the one constant since I've had 3 different machines over this same time period. 

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