Recently my system froze while a USB thumb drive was attached as sdb, and the only way I could recover was to do a power-down shutdown. Now whenever I attach a USB drive it always shows as sdc instead of the usual sdb. Here is the output from dmesg after a fresh reboot:


Code:
$ dmesg | grep sdb
[    2.538283] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
also:

Code:
$ ls /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb
It looks as if my system thinks that the USB drive is still attached. Is there some kind of setting that didn't get reset during the power-down shutdown? Can I simply delete /dev/sdb?

Xubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver