Simple USB question

I know that this post of mine is not regarding entirely about reverse engineering the Wii, but I figured that if anyone knew about this topic, it'd be you guys. If it's considered not to be in the correct place, please move it. I don't mind at all.

I'm not that savvy when it comes looking at the Wii in a physical way. I hope to do so one day, but for now, I have a question.

How is the Wii supposed to handle faulty USB drives? Today, before turning on my system, I connected a microSD USB adaptor to port 2 (farthest from edge), since I carry in it some music I like to listen to with WiiMC (also included in the same device). But when I turned my Wii on, it only showed a black screen.

I was quite baffled, since I had not done anything to my Wii prior to this moment, other than play with my emulators, and I certainly don't have it connected to the internet, so it couldn't have been a System update while I was away. Still I panicked, turned my Wii off and attempted to go into Priiloader with that same USB device still hooked on my console. To my relief, it did appear. But it took a few seconds longer than usual to load, which still made me worry. I went into HBC immediately after that, and I noticed it didn't detect my USB.

So I did what I'd do to my game cartridges back in the day: took a deep breath, and then blew on the USB to get rid of any kind of dirt or something, and hooked it again. This time, it instantly found my device, and WiiMC popped up on screen. But after trying to load a song, it gave me a code dump as if it lost connection to my USB.

I didn't try anything else with it after that, but without that device in my Wii, it would boot normally and into the System Menu.

So, after this really long read... how is the Wii supposed to respond to faulty USB devices? Was my experience the "expected" reaction from the console?

I only ask because I remembered a similar experience, but with my N64. My dad bought an official controller that had the plug cut off, and he decided to use the plug from a controller we had lying around that didn't work anymore. After joining the both ends correctly, hooking it up to the system and powering it on, the N64 would refuse to turn on until the controller was disconnected from the console (it would turn off immediately if the controller was pluged in while the console was on).
For anyone curious, the problem lied in the length of the cord after joining them, which was much longer than the standard controller (my dad thought that with the extra length, we could sit as far away as possible without having to carry the console around... too bad his idea didn't work, heh).

So, my point in telling this story is about how the console (Wii in my case) could react in possibly undocumented ways.

Regardless, I thank you for your attention, and apologize for the long post.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/02/2010 12:39PM by Magil.

The only thing I think the Wii does with USB on startup, is powering it. So the only fault it can have is that it draws to much power. However, USB spec says that you must be able to handle this properly and shut off the ports power. If they do this on the Wii however, I don't know.