USB Memory Stick lifehack

This week I inserted my trusty 32GB USB stick that I have used to sneaker net things between my various computer domains for the past couple of years into one of my laptops. I immediate got an error I had never seen before on this system running windows 7, “USB device has exceeded the power limits of its hub port”. I was given the option to reset the hub but it would remain powered off until the computer was power cycled. The computer failed to recognize any other inserted device.

I did what any self respecting engineer would do, I ignored this anomaly threw caution to the wind and plugged it into a second computer. The same thing occurred on that system. It was then that the mild panic set in that I may have lost all of my stuff, that was obviously already stored somewhere also since this was purely a transit device or maybe I’ve now fried two computers with this now demonic USB stick from hell.

Then the engineer really kicked in, what was the chance that a stick developed an internal short extreme enough to cause this when I’ve never seen this before. So I used my handy iPhone 7 Plus flash light to peer into into the USB connector to look for the foreign object that had to be there. I could see nothing. I would go back and look three times before I decided to act on a leap of faith and use a paper clip to dig out what I assumed had to be there.

It turned out that this little piece of foil had been picked up by my USB stick in the junk drawer inside one of my coat pockets and some how managed to not cause a short over enough insertions to have compressed into a nice rectangular block flat enough on the exposed side to look like the bottom of the connector. After a hibernation cycle both laptop’s USB ports came back to life. I off course will be holding onto this little “USB diagnostic tool” in case I find a need to piss of a friend or coworker in the future.