Nirsoft USBLogView Monitors USB Events
Nir Sofer strikes again! Nirsoft USBLogView monitors USB events on Windows, so you can see what’s happening on PCs when the USB mount and dismount tones are sounded. I have a Lenovo X380 Yoga laptop that keeps belling those tones repeatedly, so I wanted to figure out what caused this. Turns out these events don’t register with Reliability Monitor. Also, they’re difficult to catch inside Event Viewer. Of course, now that I’ve found this excellent tool, the errant laptop hasn’t acted up yet. So I’m leaving the tool running constantly, in hopes it will catch something when it (and if) it happens again.
As I plug in and unplug a USB flash drive, USBLogView catches each action. It does likewise for all USB bus events.
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When Nirsoft USBLogView Monitors USB Events, What Does It See?
As you can see in the preceding screen capture, USBLogView catches plug and unplug events. On another X380, it sees my dual-drive dock as a USB Attached SCSI (UAS) Mass Storage Device. Interestingly, though, when I plug in a USB-C/Thunderbolt hub, it does not see USB devices attached via that device. It does, however, see the hub itself as a USB Root Hub (USB 3.0). And, as soon as that hub is connected, it automatically gets disconnected one second later. I’m trying a powered USB-C/Thunderbolt hub next, and starting to believe there may be an issue with the USB-C/Thunderbolt port itself. But no: the powered USB-C/Thunderbolt port keeps on ticking.
And I learn something new: I have to grant explicit permission through the Thunderbolt app to allow this device chain to access the X380. When I do that, I can see the USB devices I plug into the Thunderbolt hub show up in USBLogView. Here, you see it all, courtesy of USBLogView:
Here, you also see the unpowered hub fail to stay plugged in, then the powered hub goes in, and the Mushkin UFD gets unplugged from its USB 3.0 port into a similar port on the powered hub. Good stuff!
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Hopefully, the tool will help me diagnose my strange and still-mysterious USB issues sometime soon. Stay tuned!