Free PC Support

Williw · Joined: 10 Jul 2007 Posts: 2

My external USB hard drive is recognized by Windows 98SE when plugged in, but the drive is not available (i.e. in Windows Explorer).
In the device manager I can see the device driver has been loaded without a problem.
The drive itself works just fine with Windows XP and Windows 2000.

Here is what I did so far:
1. Installed the driver supplied by the hard discs vendor, reboot, plugged in the USB hard drive, it was recognized correctly as "USB to IDE" but no drive was available.
2. Deinstallation of the USB driver for the hard disc. Deinstallation of an old USB driver for a MP3 player. Installation of NUSB3.1. Plugged in the hard drive, it was recognized and the USBSTOR driver was found and associated with the drive, but still no drive is available. For the MP3 player and another Memory Stick it worked just fine and both where available as drive G (both also associated with USBSTOR).
3. Tried various combinations of uninstalling and reinstalling the driver for the different devices so far with the same result: the usb hard dirive is recognized (i.e. I can remove the USB hard drive via the little arrow in the task bar) but the drive is not available.

Help would be much appreciated.

SoftStag · Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 1273 Location: UK

It sounds like the USB Hard Drive is formatted with NTFS rather than FAT32. Unfortunately, Windows 98SE does not support NTFS as standard. Check the drive under XP/2000 to verify what the file system is. If it is NTFS then it will not work under Windows 98SE.

If it is NTFS you can repartition the drive in XP and make it FAT32, however this will loose any data that is currently on the drive. There are some workarounds to get NTFS drives to read under 98SE, however they are not ideal and I have personally never tested them.
_________________
Quality Rare Domain Names

"Microsoft programs are generally bug-free. If you visit the Microsoft hotline, you'll literally have to wait weeks if not months until someone calls in with a bug in one of our programs. 99.99% of calls turn out to be user mistakes. I know not a single less irrelevant reason for an update than bugfixes. The reasons for updates are to present more new features."
-- Bill Gates, on code stability, from Focus Magazine

Williw · Joined: 10 Jul 2007 Posts: 2

Thanks a lot. The hard drive is indeed formatted with NTFS. Reformatting in FAT32 is not my preferred option though, as the drive does contain some data already.

I have tried the demo of the Paragon "Mount Everything" software, which allows me to immediately access the data stored on the USB drive. However, what I really want is to transfer data from Win98SE onto that drive and the 30€ seems a bit pricy for just doing a backup once...

It seems there was a tool by Microsoft once but it's not available for download anymore.

Can you recommend another tool to write to an NTFS formatted USB hard drive using Win98SE?

SoftStag · Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 1273 Location: UK

You should be able to download DOS NTFS Drivers here.

If you run the program from a DOS box within Windows 98, then you should be able to read/write to NTFS partitions while the DOS box is open.

I've never tried this, so let me know how it goes, it's something I was going to play with when I get the time.
_________________
Quality Rare Domain Names

"Microsoft programs are generally bug-free. If you visit the Microsoft hotline, you'll literally have to wait weeks if not months until someone calls in with a bug in one of our programs. 99.99% of calls turn out to be user mistakes. I know not a single less irrelevant reason for an update than bugfixes. The reasons for updates are to present more new features."
-- Bill Gates, on code stability, from Focus Magazine

markblu · Joined: 24 Aug 2007 Posts: 16

why not send all data to folder on xp machine
then format usb drive to fat32
then send all data back to usb drive

if you don't have enough space, clean it up first, don't be a packrat. just joking around! lol

whisper · Joined: 19 Oct 2007 Posts: 4

Help please. I have the same problem with my USB... But I've already checked that it's formatted as FAT32 and it still won't work. What can I do?

SoftStag · Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 1273 Location: UK

whisper · Joined: 19 Oct 2007 Posts: 4

I am using Windows 98SE. It doesn't appear under My Computer even though it is recognised when plugged in.

SoftStag · Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 1273 Location: UK

What does it appear as in Device Manager?
_________________
Quality Rare Domain Names

"Microsoft programs are generally bug-free. If you visit the Microsoft hotline, you'll literally have to wait weeks if not months until someone calls in with a bug in one of our programs. 99.99% of calls turn out to be user mistakes. I know not a single less irrelevant reason for an update than bugfixes. The reasons for updates are to present more new features."
-- Bill Gates, on code stability, from Focus Magazine

whisper · Joined: 19 Oct 2007 Posts: 4

It just appears as USB Disk.

SoftStag · Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 1273 Location: UK

OK, do the following to get some more info:

Click on Start, then Run

Type in command and press Enter

Type in cd %userprofile%\desktop and press Enter

Type in fdisk /status > fdisk.txt and press Enter

You should now have a file on the Desktop called fdisk.txt open this and post the contents on here.
_________________
Quality Rare Domain Names

"Microsoft programs are generally bug-free. If you visit the Microsoft hotline, you'll literally have to wait weeks if not months until someone calls in with a bug in one of our programs. 99.99% of calls turn out to be user mistakes. I know not a single less irrelevant reason for an update than bugfixes. The reasons for updates are to present more new features."
-- Bill Gates, on code stability, from Focus Magazine

whisper · Joined: 19 Oct 2007 Posts: 4

When I typed in cd %userprofile%\desktop it said invalid directory. And the fdisk.txt file was empty.