I left my bionic USB cable at my parents house that is 2 hours way from mine. I tried to plug my bionic in and it wouldnt conenct to my pc. I was scratching my head for about 2 hours. I only have a generic usb cable and 3 different LG cables from previous phones. My droid bionic was not connecting via usb no matter what i did. I downloaded new drivers for two different computers. Tried vista vs windows 7 but still nothing. The phone would charge correctly but wasnt being noticed by the computers and the phone USB connection notification wouldn't appear. I tried removing battery, restarting the phone, removing and swapping the memory cards (even tho that shouldn't make a difference) and still nothing. Finnaly I found my old motorolla droid 1 cable and figured i would give it a shot and...TADA. It worked! what the hell is going on? I tested out my droid 1 and it connects via all 4 of the cables.

I wanted to put this in the forum in case others had this problem so it would come up in the search.

It's a known issue.. but good post regardless

I'm using a sony usb cable from 1996 and a moto m9 dongle. works great.

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Wierd.. mine's working with a regular MicroUSB cable.. in fact, the one Im using came from a blackberry lol

Known by whom? I use USB cables from an old camera, a dead bluetooth, and a old phone. All work fine. Odd

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My cheap micro usb cable from china works without issues.

Yup..I found this out sbf'ing my wife's D2G. LG cord wouldn't work.

I have the same issue. Any micro USB will charge my Bionic, but only the Moto one will let me copy files to/from my PC. I have a few other cords laying around that I haven't tried yet. I'll try them all and report back.

edit: All moto cords work (I have D1, D2, and Bionic cables.) LG cables are fine for charging but that's it. I have a generic Chinese one at work that I'll try on Monday.

Other day I drove myself crazy trying to get my PC to recognize my phone. Finally I grabbed the chord that came with the phone and it worked.

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yeah i have another thread yesterday i started about this. I spent 4 hours on this problem. I tried 2 computers, multipe cords, battery pull everything. The bottom line is you must use a motorola usb cord. The other cords i have in my house have a LG logo on them. Those cords will only charge the phone. As soon as i grab a cord that had the motorola logo the damn bionic worked perfect and the drop down menu appeared. I am throwing out all the lg cords i have . I just ordered 4 motorola usb cords on ebay shipped for $15. I never had this problem with my original droid. I used these lg cords for my original droid for years. This seems to be a new thing with the bionic

All you need is 1-2 cords for the PC, the lg ones should be fine for just charging. Why throw them away?

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Not sure this the appropriate place for this comment, but... The usb cable that came with the Bionic is identical to the usb cable that came with the Droid 1. I've just been using the Droid 1 usb cable from day one with the Bionic.
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Well known or not, it's obviously not true. USB is a standard and unless the cable is broken or made wrong it will work in any device with the correct connections.

I just tested three of my USB cables, all of them are non-moto and all of them worked, I moved and copied files and also charged the phone. One was from my Kindle, my old camera, and short charging cord for my Bluetooth headpiece. (nice, I wonder who thought a 3 inch cable was a good idea?)

This has been my experience as well. When I got my Kindle the micro USB cable that came with it failed so I found micro USB cables on Amazon for $.01 so I bought 10 of them. I keep several in my laptop bag all the time. I have used the Moto cords and the cheap cords with my Kindle, OG Droid, and Bionic for data transfer and charging. I have experienced no problems what so ever. YMMV

The cables you have that are not working are possibly broken (it's easy to break cords if you are rough with them, shoving them in bags and spooling them up tightly et al) or your computer is doing that windows not recognizing a USB device at certain times thing.

I tried this at work today using a micro usb cord that came with my Blackberry (2nd phone - company phone) and was able to transfer files off the bionic to my laptop just fine. I can see this issue being related to the quality of the cable, but not the manufacturer brand name (although certain companies could be generally lower quality than needed for this operation).

I'm using the one I had for my OG Droid.