Bad USB stick -> instant reboot on Windows machines

One of my USB sticks recently stopped working on Linux - it doesn't show up as a device node, and dmesg shows messages about an "unknown device."

So, in what was probably a rather stupid move, I plugged it into the Windows 2000 box...

Bam. Instant reboot. Not even a BSOD, the computer just reboots immediately. I've never seen anything like that before, WIn2k is usually stable as a rock.

I very much doubt the stick was infected; I've only used it to hold bootable Linux images, and only plugged it into known clean computers. So I suspect hardware failure. But what kind of hardware failure on a USB stick would cause Windows to instantly reboot like that? I'm pretty curious about that.

 

Yup, I remember that one. I believe that's an issue with Win2K that was fixed in one of the service packs. More info might be on the USBMan website:

http://www.usbman.com/Win2000.htm

for example, one of the fixes in SP3:

Q291284 - "Stop 0x00000050" Error Message When USB Device Is Connected

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;q291284

 

This machine has SP4 Rollup 1... Evidently not all the bugs were fixed!

 

Perhaps you might find some useful troubleshooting tools on Uwe Sieber's website:

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/english.html