External USB hard drive

[ldb]

Purchased an WD 3.2 GB External USB hard drive mostly for use when backing up newer computers. I tried installing this on my 98SE machine. The drive appeared to install and is seen in device manager and says it is working correctly. It did displace my 2 CD rom drives and now one of the drives does not have a drive letter associated with it. Have not tried the CD drives. The computer upon boot found the new hardware and installed a driver using the file usbstor.inf. When I try to access the drive, I get an access violation in WDsetup.exe which is not on my C:\ drive, but may be installed on the USB drive. Clicking through several of these, leaves me back where I started with no apparent ill effects except the drive not working. I tried transferring a small file to the drive and did not get any errors, but cannot tell if the file transferred.

Any way to get this to work with a different driver. I installed nusb.exe several months ago.

Thanks

[thydreamwalker]

Try NUSB31.exe or /and NUSB33.exe as these adds more newer usb drivers to 98SE! http://www.mdgx.com or MSFN Forum Topics:USB *WDC External Hdd shoulda had an install floppy or cdrom -just for usb or internal drivers?*also try http://www.everythingusb.com Edited July 13, 2008 by thydreamwalker

[ldb]

It appears that I am using the 3.3 usb update. The drive is 320 GB and not 3.2 GB. The drive takes over one of the CD rom drive letters and moves the first one down a letter. The second CD rom although listed in device manager, does not work and is lost from the list of drives in my computer.

I was not expecting this to work, but when the drive was recognized and given a drive letter, it seemed more promising.

[herbalist]

I'm using a WD80 external drive with 98FE. It's a couple years old, so I can't say if the installer for yours is different. The CD that came with it installed Retrospect, apparently some kind of backup software I didn't want. Instead of using setup on the CD's root directory, I ran PL2507_Driver_WD_16250.exe which is in :\English\Installer\roem\WD\USB. This installs the drivers and a disk removal utility. On mine, the ext drive wasn't usable without that utility. It wasn't necessary to have it running, but it did have to be installed. Yours might be similar. If I remember correctly, Retrospect wouldn't work with 98FE but the drivers themselves do.

This is taken from my 98FE box. The installer added both the USB Mass storage device in hard disk controllers and the WD entry in disk drives.

In your device manager, do you have fixed drive letters assigned to the CD drives or are you letting Windows assign the drive letters? I've had better results choosing my own drive letters for the CD.

On my PC, the built in USB is 1.0. The external drive worked poorly when connected to it. The nusb update didn't help much. It worked much better when I installed a new USB card and the 2.0 Orangeware drivers. For me, version 2.3 of the drivers works the best, better than the newer ones. Connected to the USB card, it's almost as fast as the internal drives.

Rick

Edited July 13, 2008 by herbalist

[jaclaz]

@ldb

From the screenshot by herbalist it is clear that his external drive uses a Prolific USB to ATA or USB to SATA controller.

Usually the make/model of the controller can be derived from the USB Vid/Pid:

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/?showtopic=1659

Once you have the manufacturer and chip, you can try getting the win98 drivers from the manufacturer site, in the case of Prolific:

http://www.prolific.com.tw/eng/download.asp

If you could post EXACT model of the hard disk it may help too.

jaclaz

Edited July 13, 2008 by jaclaz

[ldb]

It is a a Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 320 GB USB 2.0 drive. It says it is only for 2000/XP/Vista. It is supposed to be detected automatically by these systems and no driver disk was included and I could find nothing at the WD website. My computer reports it as a WDC3200AAJ.

I have my hard drive partitioned into 6 partitions C-H. The 2 CD roms come up as I and J. I am only able to choose from these 2 drive letters in the drop down box. If I boot up with the WDC3200AAJ attached, it takes the I drive and bumps the I CD rom into the J position and the J drive disappears and does not work when a CD is entered even though the drive lights work. I know that there is some program where you can control the drive letter assignment, but I cannot remember the name.

I do not have a seperate USB 2.0 add in card installed. My motherboard controller is listed as SIS 7001 PCI to USB host controller.

Thanks for all the help.

[thydreamwalker]

"Lastdrive=Z" listed in config files? ;As my WDC-USB/Hdd/160gb works "Great" with USB Storage driver on 98SE cdrom ?(*Also have 2 USB-Cruzer-Flashdrives attached)

[jaclaz]

The program is Letter Assigner:

http://www.v72735.f2s.com/LetAssig/

Can you try retrieving the Vid and Pid of the USB device?

I have no idea of what USB tool would work on 9x, SIW:

http://www.gtopala.com/

should be able to get those ID's

you can also try these ones:

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/?showtopic=4661

Don't you have a friend running 2K or XP?

jaclaz

[herbalist]

Maybe this will work?

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.as...=38〈=en

I compared the contents of this archive to the one I used from my install CD. They contain files with the same names but different versions.

I'd set fixed drive letters for the CD drives in the device manager before installing the drivers for the external.

Rick

[ldb]

Device Name: ++USB Mass Storage Device(USB Disk)

PnP Device ID: VID = 1058 PID = 1100

Serial Number: 57442D574D41543132313632343931

Revision: 1.65

Device Type: Standard USB device - USB2.0 Full-Speed (USB1.1)

Thanks thydreamwalker, the lastdrive statement clued me in on what I did years ago when I played DOS games to save a small amount of memory. I was at lastdrive = J. Changed it to K.

Thanks again for the help guys.