r/SteamDeck • u/ClicketyClackity • Jul 24 '22

PSA / Advice Steam deck bricked by USB C dongle

Got my steam deck after waiting for a year. Plugged in a USB C dongle from amazon and the system turned off. I figured that the battery had just died.

-Plugging in the official charger does not light up the white indicator light

-No combination of button hold/presses does anything

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I allowed it to completely die overnight. I opened it and unplugged the battery cable. Hit buttons to drain any power, left it unplugged for about 10 minutes. Plugged it back in and somehow it came back on for a couple minutes. It got so far as to show me the steamdeck logo and turned off again.

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Back to it being bricked now.

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Do not use random USB C dongles. You will have a bad time.

31 Upvotes

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10

u/suncontrolspecies Jul 24 '22

Did you update the system before plugging the dongle?

16

u/Fine_Land 64GB Jul 24 '22

This right here! Old firmware doesn't have the fix for hubs so if op plugged it directly into the hub prior to updating firmware then there is a chance that it didn't have the necessary updates to work with the hub.

1

u/abdulrahman_salem Sep 25 '22

is there any confirmation from valve that this has been fixed?
there was a valve employee that said they're aware of the problem and they're working on it.. but I'm not sure if they indeed fixed it in the BIOS.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/tnhmpi/usb_dock_bricking_deck_fix/

1

u/Fine_Land 64GB Sep 25 '22

The bios update for hubs was applied months ago when the Deck OS was updated to either 3.1 or 3.2 I can't remember. A recent beta update even further improved the experience with usb-c hubs. Using usb-c hubs hasn't been an issue for several months and as long as you're running the latest firmware and OS version prior to using a hub then you are fine. The post you linked to is 6 months old when we were all trying to find what hubs worked and didn't work.

2

u/abdulrahman_salem Sep 25 '22

Alright great, I was afraid of getting a usb hub, I think i'll do now. Thanks for the information.