Every now and then, something breaks. I’ve had two USB thumb drives go bad on me (and a couple others go missing). The most recent one to go bad was a 2 gig one. I try not to keep anything really important on them, but they’re a lot more convenient than burning CDs or DVDs, so that doesn’t always hold.
In any case, I knew there was a lot of stuff on this one that I hadn’t saved yet, so I wanted to offload it, if I could. There were two options – either there was a mechanical failure, or one of the chips had gone bad. If a chip had gone bad, I was out of luck. If it was mechanical, I could possibly do something about it.
Since I had an old USB 1.0 hub that was itself acting a little flakey, I decided to sacrifice both of them to a rescue attempt. Now, a soldering iron is supposedly one of the most dangerous things a software type can have in hand, as illustrated below. It worked, however. And isn’t that what really matters?
(As is now presumably usual, click for larger.)
