USB flash drive not recognized on desktop or disk utility

I see a number of similar threads to this but nothing solves this problem.  Any help will be greatly appreciated as I am about to go crazy!
I have 3 USB thumb drives that all worked 2 days ago - now only one does.  I have tried all drives in multiple ports and the same result.  I have restarted the iMac (2009 Yosemite) a number of times and the same result.
This came about attempting to create bootable USBs with each of these.  I was struggling with the process on my mac so took 2 (brand new 16GB PNYs) to a PC created the live boot USBs and they booted fine on the PC (knowing this wouldn't boot my mac).  I did however plug them into my mac and they were recognized.  I finally found success creating a Ubuntu live boot with my old USB.  With that success I wanted to try with one of the new USBs on the mac.
Here is what I did:
1. Using Disk Utility - Reformatted the drive 1 partition MS Dos FAT 32
2. In Terminal unmounted the drive and ran a dd command to copy the linux .img file successfully
3. Box came up saying drive not recognized and selected to ignore (this happened on my old one that still works also)
4. Ejected drive from terminal
5  Restarted mac and attempted to boot from USB without success.
After this the 2 new USBs were no longer recognized in any usb port while the other still is.  They do not show on the desktop nor in Disk Utility.  I checked them on the PC and they are still both recognized and showing the FAT 32 format.
Help please!

Thank you for the reply.  I found some time to go through this process a number of times without success
Any other suggestions?

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