Flash drive showing up very strangely

[MR ZenWiz]

Among other oddball issues, now I have another one.

I have a flash drive which i use for storing many files I like to have
portable. Until the problem with my home drive came up yesterday, it
was working totally fine.

Today, this happens:

I plug in the drive, I get the usual notification popup in the upper
right hand corner of the screen, and it says the drive is mounted. I
can see it in Thunar. However, it is not registering such that df can
see it, and my established symlink to it from / does not work at all.
I can't ls any files on it, etc.

Another oddity is that I have a directory in my /home (both the
original defunct one I have mounted on /mnt for now) and in the /home
on the boot drive, where I'm running temporarily (until I get a
replacement home disk) and the directory, which file properly
identifies as such, shows up in Thunar as a symlink to the flash
drive, independently from its actual access to the drive itself..

WTF???

Thanks.

Mark