"The NEC disk drive should be checked as removable. Removable refers to the media itself."

Oh, I thought it meant the drive could be removed, lol. Thanks.

I screwed up with the driver info. They aren't in the same paragraph as the WD drives but rather the start of a new paragraph for that hardware. Sorry. My bad.

I had to look at it again to realize it. I will fix the previous post but leave the info as maybe it has value or not.

Update-

If I have any external plugged in now and try to boot it won't boot. If I have the external unplugged but don't remove all instances of it in Device Manager it won't boot either. Strangest thing. Once any instance to external is removed then I can boot normally.

How can I get back to the USB default settings without doing a clean install of WIN98SE?

Can I install certain files over the top to get back to default USB driver settings.

I can see that Windows is loading the wrong driver for the new external h.d. I know which driver should be loaded with the external. Is there a way to manually install the driver to the associated external, like a DOS command? That might do the trick for my system being able to see a new external.

Can I make a boot disk from the saved registry settings that do work when an external h.d. is plugged in and boot from it?

There has to be a way to fix this usb issue.

Any ideas?

thanks.