[Solved] nusb doesn't recognize external hard disk

[Zapeth]

Hello, I'm using Windows 98 SE with nusb 3.5 installed.

I want to plugin my 250GB external harddrive (formatted to FAT32 previously) and at first the system says "new drive found, searching for drivers" and he even finds "appropriate" drivers for it, namely

Disk Drive [4-23-1999], C:\WINDOWS\INF\DISKDRV.INF

Then I click next and nothing happens (except the driver windows closes). No new drive shows up in the explorer but when I look in the device manager he lists a new storage device that is connected.

After that I tried to reinstall the drivers to see if anything went wrong during the install and then he suggested me another driver labeled

USB Disk [10-28-2007], C:\WINDOWS\INF\USBNTMAP.INF

which I believe is the right one (even though he didn't offer me that one when initially trying to install the driver).

However when trying to install it he asks for the Win98 CD to search for a file called "usbmphlp.pdr" (and probably some other files) which is nowhere to be found on the CD.

A quick Google search gave me the suspicion that those required files might be on a Windows ME CD, could that be true?

Anyway, can anyone suggest me what I can do to make the external hard disk / new driver working correctly? Thanks in advance

edit: So after checking on a Windows ME disk I actually found that required file (in the folder Win9x). But I'm unsure whether I should simply use those files or find some other way to make the drive work? I don't want to mess anything up with my USB configuration now...

edit2: Ok I tried it anyway, seems like all the required files were there. But after a restart the drive is still not accessible!

It now shows up in the device manager as "USB drive" instead of "Disk Drive" but with a yellow exclamation mark indicating that the device is not working properly (that wasn't the case with the previous driver).

A reinstallation of the same driver didn't change anything so I'm pretty much out of options here. Maybe someone has an idea what I could do?

Edited January 7, 2013 by Zapeth

[rloew]

Replace USBMPHLP.PDR with the one in NUSB. It will be in WINDOWS\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS.

[Zapeth]

Okay after doing that the exclamation mark in the device manager went away and when I want to "safely eject" it, it says

Stop USB Disk - Drive (

Previously it just said

Stop USB Disk

There now is an "USB Disk" listed in Storage Devices (using the nusb driver) and a new Disk drive (probably my external disk), "ST325082 0A" using the DISKDRV.INF driver.

I looked into the properties of the Disk drive and saw that the "Removeable" option wasn't set in the the Properties tab. So I did that and assigned a letter to the drive.

After restarting there is now a Removeable Disk visible in the Explorer, however when I want to access it it says that the drive is not formatted though I'm sure that the drive has a FAT32 file system which should be recognized by Windows98.

I guess I'll backup my files and try the reformat thing, I hope I will be able to access it afterwards

[rloew]

You may have copied other Windows ME files that you shouldn't have.

Try replacing NTMAPHLP.PDR with the one in NUSB. It will be in WINDOWS\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS.

[LoneCrusader]

All of the required files are already provided by NUSB. Using files from Windows ME will NOT work, as many files from ME require some small modification to work under 98SE.

NUSB extracts copies of all the required files to the proper location when installed. There is no need to copy anything else from any other source, although copies are placed in \WINDOWS\OPTIONS\CABS by the installer if they are needed for some reason.

The correct .INF to use when installing the drive should be USBSTOR.INF, and then it will in turn use USBNTMAP.INF as well. In order to reinstall the drive, you may need to go into Safe Mode and remove all instances of the drive, both under "Storage devices" and "Universal Serial Bus controllers."

You may encounter issues with drives that while formatted to FAT32, may be marked in their partition type as "Hidden FAT32." See this thread. (Some info therein is dated now; do not apply the HotFix suggested by dencorso, as it applied to an older version of NUSB.)

Edited January 2, 2013 by LoneCrusader

[Zapeth]

Try replacing NTMAPHLP.PDR with the one in NUSB. It will be in WINDOWS\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS.

I already did that (to be save I reinstalled nusb and I even checked each of the files with the ones of nusb, they are all the same). And ended up with the situation I described in my last post.

As I said, I had nusb installed but for some reason Windows decided not to search in the default places for the required files but instead wanted to have the "Windows 98 SE Disk" or in other words NTMAPHLP.PDR

The correct .INF to use when installing the drive should be USBSTOR.INF, and then it will in turn use USBNTMAP.INF as well. In order to reinstall the drive, you may need to go into Safe Mode and remove all instances of the drive, both under "Storage devices" and "Universal Serial Bus controllers."

There was actually a third instance in "Disk Drives" that seems to have the real name of the drive. I deleted those too (as well as a working USB just to have a comparison) and went through the whole process again.

When I plug the external drive in, it is automatically recognized, all three instances are added to the list. And basically it's the same process as the working USB, even the drivers for each "device" in the list are the same.

The only difference is that for some reason Windows doesn't set the "Removeable" option in the preferences tab for the drive and doesn't assign it to a drive letter (as I said earlier) where the USB has this feature automatically. I believe this is because he doesn't recognize the filesystem of the hard disk.

But going to my next question, should I simply let Windows 98 format my external drive or should I try to somehow make it recognizeable again? I mean I have no problem with deleting its data since I just did a backup but I'm unsure whether Windows 98 messes my drive up or not

edit: Formatted the drive with Win98 (surprisingly there are a lot more options than with WinXp or upwards), erverything worked fine except when he wanted to check the drive afterwards with ScanDisk he couldn't because there was "not enough memory available" which I doubt. But reading and writing to the drive worked fine anyway

Edited January 4, 2013 by Zapeth