Sandisk USB not detected by Ubuntu 14.04 but detected by Windows 7

It turned out the usb-storage module was not being loaded at startup and so couldn't detect any USB drives.

To try it first, I inserted my usb, opened up the terminal and typed sudo modprobe usb-storage and it was detected.

To make the changes permanent, I edited the file /etc/modules as root and added the line usb-storage

My file now looks like this:

# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be loaded
# at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with "#" are ignored.

usb_storage
lp

Source: ubuntuforums