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External Hard Drive for Windows 98 (not SE) Help


fallout82

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Hello first time here,

Here are my specs

Win 98 (not SE)

333

pentium II (maybe)

2 usb ports

10 gig HDD

I am afraid I don't know much more at the moment.

1. I am trying to locate an external HDD but have been very unsuccesful in locating one for Windows 98. Almost all I have found have been only for 98SE or above. Do they actually exist today or is it too late, any help?

2. Is there a driver that will work on my 98 that will trick some such new external HDD into working even though it says no support? I don't need much only 10 gig or so. Also I am confused as if what I should be looking for is an USB driver or if the external HDD is actually supported for win 98.

3. I am also just now looking into external USB HDD enclosures since I have not found the alternative. Are there any limits on HDD size and anything I might over look having never done this before. If I am able to find an enclosure that supports regular 98 with drivers not SE. and buy like a 80 or 160 gig HDD to insert will it work?

I am about to give up and take it in to somewhere and just have them yank it so I can retire this beast.

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I have a number of generic disk drivers that run on Windows 98 as well as SE.

My personal favorite is freely available in the "Prerelease and Beta" section on my website:

http://rloew1.no-ip.com

After trying several of them on Windows 98, I have determined thay there is s serious problem elsewhere in the USB software.

When transferring data from an Internal Hard Drive to a USB Drive, buffers sometimes are damaged and garbage can be written to both the USB Drive and the Internal Hard Drive. This often results in damage to a directory sector and both FAT tables, often resulting in significant data loss.

I would not recommend using a USB Drive with Windows 98 until this problem is solved.

Edited by rloew
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So for example, I have a WD external usb hd (320 gig passport elite) will this be too big for my system? Do I need to format it into FAT32 for my old system to recognize it also? Oh and just to be sure you were talking abou the Maximus Decim's Usb Driver right, I was reading about it and had a glint of hope?

I just hope my USB ports are 1.1 and not 1.0 sigh.

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Your USB ports are 1.1. USB 1.0 is rare.

Maybe you´d be better off putting an USB 2 PCI card in your system, as USB 1.1 is awfully slow. (About 1MB/sec, so it will cost 320000 seconds ~ 4 days to fill that 320 GB disk.)

You can format it to one 320 GB fat32 partition, but it´s safer to create several partitions < 128GB, because W98 scandisk and defrag cannot handle bigger partitions. (It´s not a good idea to use defrag via USB 1.1 though).

BTW, fat32 is the only choice you have.

 

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Mijzelf, thanks for the imput. At most I will have 8 gig of stuff to transfer, so it won't be unbearable. The main reason I am doing this is to help get stuff off of the parents computer and back up the pictures they have there.

I plan on this being a one time deal, as I think a new pc is coming soon. As long as this is a pretty safe bet that copying some files using the Maximus driver even works for my current ordeal.

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I have 98FE with a 366mhz Celeron and an external WD hard drive. In order to get good performance from the external drive, I did have to add a new 2.0 USB card. The built in USB was too slow, no matter what I did to it. The USB card packaging and CD both said that 98SE was required, but it works fine on my FE box. It came with Orangeware drivers which installed normally.

The external hard drive packaging also said that 98SE was required. It turned out that the additional software they supplied needs 98SE or newer (a "button manager" and backup software called Retrospect), not the hard drive itself. I blocked the CD from autoplaying, navigated to what appeared to be a driver installer, and launched it manually. This also installed a "safely remove hardware" utility. The OS recognized the external drive afterwards. My external is several years old so your CD is probably different, but on mine the path to the drivers was:

F:\English\Installer\roem\WD\USB\PL2507_Driver_WD_16250.exe

Rick

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Sweet thanks for that I was kind of wondering if the SE driver might have a slim chance of working. Worth a shot I suppose although the WD passport HDD is only a few months old who knows what they changed, guess we will see.

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I've run into this "compatibility" issue repeatedly. My external hard drive, the USB card, a USB datafax modem, and a universal card reader, all from different companies, all are supposed to need 98SE or newer, but all work fine on my FE box. For a one time shot, you can probably use the existing 1.1 USB, but for regular usage a 2.0 card is worth getting. If I remember right, I paid $39 for one at WalMart. Except for a slight delay when it's first accessed, the external drive feels as fast as the internal drives. I initially intended to live with the slower speeds of 1.1 using the external drive for system backups. The main reason I bought the 2.0 card was to get more ports. The speed increase it brought opened up all kinds of possibilities, including running applications from the external drive.

Rick

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Well turns out that my current one does not even list 98SE it only goes down to 2000, so I will try to find one that atleast says it does 98SE. Anyone have any suggestions where I could find one or if it would be worth trying to use the WD passport I have (could that mess anything up?). I am more worried about the integrity of the old pc than if I screw up the new drive.

I remember finding a table of External HDDs and ones that had 98SE support on either seagate or WD webpages but cant find it now... bummer.

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Personally I'd just buy (or borrow, for a one-timer) a Flash stick of 8GB or whatever suits the purpose. Dealing with external hard drives is just too cumbersome, IMHO.

Edited by Drugwash
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