Can an External usb device short a computer?

I'm usually over in networking but I have a problem with a laptop that is just not making sense.

A friend's eee pc netbook died. It didn't want to hold a charge and at the same time it would not boot XP. Booting to safe mode didn't work, it would hang at Mup.sys, flash a quick blue screen and reboot itself.

I thought I had it back working. The battery did end up taking a charge now. The user gave me an external hard drive that she uses to try to boot form the XP cd. She and I both travel to Europe all the time so I generally wouldn't have a problem with dual voltage devices on an adapter BUT . . . could this european usb external drive with a dual voltage power supply and adapter have damaged the netbook? Is such a thing possible? Can power travel up a usb cable?

 

Power can travel along anything made of conductive material so if the drive is faulty with some sort of shorting issue then yes, you could get power travel back up your USB along a data line and trash your motherboard... although I would point out that this is nothing to do with dual voltage and is simply down to a faulty componenet. I would stress that in practice I have never herd of this happening though and suspect that the voltage would not be high enough to cause any long term damage and would most likely cause a BSOD or similar restart. This would be resolved when you disconnect the device.

MUP.sys appears to be the driver used to connect to Novel servers but I'm not a networking expert so it doesn't mean much to me.

Assuming you have now got the battery issue resolved and you can get the PC to post try booting from your windows CD and get windows to try and repair itself.

Good luck

 

That's right, it's difficult to track it down, you may be better to try to follow what happens in normal mode boot, there are more visual clues during the later stages:

It's not easy

In the advanced boot menu, where you select Safe Mode, there's a setting (I think) to disable reboot on blue screen, I think it's a one off thing, it needs selecting at each boot you want to study. If you can get a 'photo of the blue screen or copy the full error message and post it up, we'll have a better chance of finding the problem

 

Wow, thank you. I was ready to hand the little offender back to it's owner and shrug. I'll try this tonight instead.

Great info, learned something new again today!