Thumb Drive Fix
A relative of mine recently came to me with an interesting problem. Recently a "tech" co-worker of her's inadvertently destroyed her USB thumb drive, which of course contained gobs of very important data that hadn't been backed up. Naturally I was happy to help. The "tech" did save me some time by "removing" the case of the thumb drive for me though =). Once I took a look at it I could see where the male USB connector had been broken off the board. I knew that it would simply be a matter of restoring that connection, so I grabbed a spare USB cable.
The cable I used was a USB A-B type cable, but you could really use any cable that has a male USB connector on one side. I then cut the other connector off and stripped the insulation to reveal the 4 wires that make up a USB cable. I found a wiring diagram online to show the USB pinout, this diagram is reproduced on a sticky note in the background.
Next step was to solder those tiny wires onto the solder pads left behind when the connector was broken off. Pay attention to the orientation of the wires, if you get them backward there probably won't be any permanent damage done, but it's just easier to get them right the first time. Once the wires are in place just use the new USB connector as you normally would. I was able to recovered all 55MB of data off of this 64MB drive. Hopefully you'll be this lucky as well.