John Harrii

Bingo. Thank you again. Everything works now! Using a Seagate wizard, I re-partitioned the NTFS disk drive as FAT32. Plugged in the drive and it was immediately added to the Control Panel as Drive D: Looking back on this thread it seems like a long and winding road but in fact there are only three steps: 1) Jettison all pre-existing USB.INV files. This is what took all the time and caused the most puzzlement. It is because this Dell must have a history of USB or would-be USB drive installations, and because I had myself run quite a few USB installation experiments before I discovered XUSBSUPP. I guess the observation is that USB.INV can be disguised by other names, and can lurk in directories such as USB95. The common naming themes are 1) the INV extension and 2) the letters USB or usb, sometimes masked by a prefix or suffix, as for example, USBstor.INV or MicrosoftUSB.INV 2) After XUSBSUPP has been installed, it is necessary to reboot before attempting to plug in the disk drive 3) The disk must be partitioned as FAT32, not NFTS. The USB external storage disk works great, and now I have a way to move substantial files in and out of the win95 computer. Finding some old friends from antiquity in this pile of old 3.5 floppies. QBasic, dbase II, and a DOS Lotus 123. Nice to have a real fully functional DOS. Cannot thank you enough for XUSBSUPP and for your time and patient, accurate help -- this is a breakthrough program for me. John Harris

Good Morning Conner, thank you again for your time and help. I disconnected the USB drive, booted into Safe Mode, removed the UBS hard disk controller from the device manager, and then rebooted. This was the reboot operation I skipped in the previous installation. When I plugged the USB drive into the connector, the system immediately detected the new hardware. There ensued a series of on-screen prompts while the system sought and quickly found a driver for the Seagate USB drive. The driver installation was successful. However (always a "however" in these narratives) the USB drive did not become visible in My Computer. I was expecting to see something like Drive D: or perhaps Expansion Drive, but there was nothing new in the enumeration of disk drives: just C: and the floppy drive. Rebooted, USB drive still not visible. Rebooted into safe mode and studied the listings under USB Controller and under Hard Drive Controller. Here they are: USB Controller: - Generic USB mass storage class device - Intel 82371 PCI to USB controller - USB Mass Storage Class Device Controller - UBS Root Hub Hard Disk Controllers: - Intel 82371 AB/EB/MB PCI Bus Master IDE Controller - Intel 82801BAM Ultra ATA Storage Controller - 244A - Primary IDE Controller (dual fifo) - Primary IDE Controller (dual fifo) - SanDisk Cruizer Titanium USB Flash Drive - Secondary IDE Controller (dual fifo) - Secondary IDE Controller (dual fifo) - OPTI Dual PCI IDE Controller Some of these must be legacies from the Dell's previous owner. For example, I do not own a SanDisk Cruizer Titanium USB Flash Drive. (I think he was running XP incidentally, not Win 95). I also notice duplications in the list of the Primary and Secondary IDE controllers. There are many Hard Disk Controllers listed in Safe Mode, but I am not sure any of them are the USB drive controller that I installed. A USB Mass Storage Class Device Controller is listed under the USB Controller column, however. Net of it, we keep getting closer and closer to Eureka, but we're still just a little short. Many thanks for your insights. John Harris

Thank you for these excellent suggestions. The Win95 Dell laptop had no network connector, so a week ago I ordered a PCMCIA card with both a modem and an ethernet connection. Still waiting for delivery. Meantime, I think it is worthwhile trying to set up the USB drive, both for myself and for other users who may encounter similar obstacles. In searching for the rogue USB.INF files, I found two directories -- outside of the Windows directory -- that seemed suspect. One directory was labeled Us95msd This one was a leftover from my experiments with a downloaded copy of USBSTR95.exe. It contained an INF file called USBstor, and a couple of other INFs. I erased all the files in the directory and then erased the directory itself. The second curious directory was labelled Usb95. Maybe this one came with the computer. It contained two INFs, which I erased. I changed the extensions to 000 on the remaining files. Suddenly, I noticed everything was working much better. I found I could work inside the device manager, removing hardware, without locking up the system. It was no longer necessary to operate in Safe Mode. The fresh installation of XUSBSUPP seemed to go smoothly. On reboot, the system found and fully installed 1) the USB Controller (i.e., the Intel 82371 AB/EB/MB PCI to USB Host Controller) and 2) a USB Root Hub. That seemed to be the end of the processes driven by XUSBSUPP.exe. At this point I plugged my USB portable drive into the USB port. Its status LED lit up green, and I can see its hard disk controller listed in the device manager along with a yellow exclamation mark. But at this stage it does not yet work. No driver, apparently. This is a USB 2.0 drive, but I think it should be backward compatible with a USB 1.0 port. Specifically, it is a Seagate 9SD2A2-500 250GB. A setup program from Seagate was on the drive, and I copied it to a floppy (on the Win 7 machine) and then ran this Setup.exe on the Win95. It splashed the screen with messages about a missing kernel dll, but it was obviously not about to install a driver. Also, this seemed like a divergent path to follow, since I believe XUSBSUPP already contains drivers for USB portable drives. So that's where we are today. A lot further along than yesterday, I think, but not quite there. The concept of the "rogue USB.INF" was absolutely right. The machine was spattered with them.... Thank you again for your time and insights. John

Hello LoneCrusader, Many thanks for your time and suggestions. This is extremely helpful. Here is an update on progress so far. I began by uninstalling XUSBSUPP. I then followed the detailed instructions, as follows. "Boot into Safe Mode and remove all USB devices and Unknown Devices." Done. There were no Unknown devices listed in the device manager, but under Other I found an Unsupported device. I deleted it. "While still in Safe Mode go to the WINDOWS\INF folder and WINDOWS\INF\OTHER folder and delete USB.INF if it exists." I did not find USB.INF in WINDOWS\INF directory. "In the \OTHER folder it may have a different name such as MicrosoftUSB.INF" Yes, sure enough, exactly. I found and deleted MicrosoftUSB.INF. I also deleted an INF file called usbstw95.INF. This is probably a residue from a program I found online and tried called USBSTR95.exe. It apparently installs drivers, but did not do anything for my particular situation. "This should clear out the problem and the USB devices should not be automatically reinstalled on each boot. When you reboot you should be able to simply cancel the driver install requests and get to the Desktop in order to install XUSBSUPP." On reboot after the various changes I made in Safe Mode, the system identified new hardware quite specifically. This might be helpful information. It found an Intel 82371 AB/EB/MB PCI to Universal Host Controller. I defaulted past several pop up messages. These concluded with the admonition that "this device cannot be used unless you install a driver using the device manager." I then re-installed XUSBSUPP. When the installation was finished I plugged in my USB hard drive. The system did not detect any new hardware, so I went to Add Hardware and scanned for it. When the scan was concluded it reported that it had found no new hardware. I then tried a manual new hardware install. I selected from a drop down menu the Intel 82371 Controller, and sent the system looking for a driver. No luck. In the end it reported that "setup has detected a decoding error .. cannot read the setup (CAB) file: usbd.sys cannot be found. Maybe I could solve or improve this by downloading and installing the driver for Intel 82371 AB/EB/MB PCI to Univeral Host Controller. The Win95 computer has no online access, but I could download one with my Win7 machine and deliver it to the old computer on a floppy, provided it is a small file. I have been trying this and that, with no very clear plan, for a few days now, and it may be that the best course would be to run a clean reboot and start over. At some point I got a message that I needed a file called USBIMW95.SYS. I downloaded one (to the Win7 machine) and transferred and copied it into the Win95 machine's SYS files. Did nothing, so I subsequently erased it. To make the Win95 computer really functional, for our purposes, I need a way to move large files in and out of it. By "large" I mean larger files than fit onto 3.5 floppies. For example, I have downloaded to the Win7 machine a word processing conversion pack for Word 2000. The pack contains converters that enable Word 2000 to read old WordPerfect and AmiPro files, among others. The Converter Pack is too big for a floppy. I tried to transfer it to the Win 95 machine via a burned CD-ROM but the Win 95 machine was unable to "see" the file imprinted by the Win7 machine. This is one example. Moving book manuscripts is another major issue. USB storage devices could solve these problems easily. Thank you so much for your help and insights, and for analyzing and solving the Win 95 USB storage problem. It seems like a very promising approach. Best, John

Thank you for creating the extended USBSUPP. It looks like a wonderful solution to the persistent problem of how to connect USB drives to Win 95 machines. Having a little difficulty getting my portable USB hard drive to connect, but I think the problem can probably be worked through. I am following the XUSBSUPP readme.txt instructions for machines in which Win95 is already installed. In my case it is a refurbished Dell C600 laptop. We bought this computer to gain access to some old book manuscripts written in the 90s on DOS word processors and stored on 3.5 inch floppies.. Here is the difficulty. As a preliminary step I uninstall the pre-existing USBSUPP. Worked okay. Then the instructions suggest I go into the device manager and delete the "other" devices and the existing USB devices. This is where the trouble starts. There are no "other" devices listed, but there are some listed under USB. In each case, when I remove the device, it asks me to reboot. Catch 22. Upon reboot Windows of course rediscovers the "new" USB port hardware and tries to install it. Naturally, the USB device reappears in the device manager listing. It cannot find a driver, by the way, and always appears along with a yellow exclamation point. . . Rarely, however, do I get to the reboot stage. It is possible to remove the USB devices, but only in Safe Mode. In Window's normal mode, in most cases the system freezes up solid as soon as I click "remove." The only way out is to cycle power. Maybe I am missing a step. If you have successfully connected a USB drive, I would appreciated your help on how to get past this hurdle. Thank you for your insights, John .