Hi I have an old computer that has windows 98 I use it toplay my old games on it doesn’t have much hard drive space I want to get an external hard drive to use on it! Is this possible ,is there such a device with the right drivers ? Please HELP!!!
I doubt it Win 98 was dead years ago.
Joe
hey that’s not very nice!!!
Well, I doubt that any of the new external drives will work under Windows 98, this OS will not find any drivers for the external drive, you might be able to find an old drive model, but honestly, I think that most of this drive needs at least Windows 98 SE.
You most likely will not find anything because nobody writes the drivers for them anymore. They just use current Windows drivers.
Is going to be very difficult to find a drive compatible with win 98, I recommend to upgrade your OS
You might look into Virtual PCs and clone the W98 onto a VM. As far as drivers you’re probably out of luck. When MS dropped 98 so did everybody else.
Joe
Joe_S wrote:
You might look into Virtual PCs and clone the W98 onto a VM. As far as drivers you’re probably out of luck. When MS dropped 98 so did everybody else.
Joe
What he said…
Your best would be to get a copy of VMWare on a newer (You want to make sure it has at least a gig of RAM and a decent processor) Windows machine, and create a small virtual machine where you can install Windows 98. Because the OS is so old, the virtual machine should have no problem running the OS, and you shouldn’t notice much of a difference between the VM and the actual Windows 98 computer.
Once you do this you can run whatever you want on Windows 98, and any data you want to back up you can just drag to your actual computer and than throw it on to the disk from there.
I find VMWare a bit complex.
I prefer VirtualBox. It’s free as well, for home use…
Tony the biggest reason I went to VMware is it is much easier to network. It was a pain to network Virtual box if you wanted more than just the shared file VMware does it automatically. VMware Player is free and now you can create the VM with it. And there is Go Virtual http://www.paragon-software.com/home/go-virtual/ Which will copy your desktop and make a VM
Joe
WD’s SmartWare drives may be a problem, but regular external hard drives work just fine on Win98SE. In fact I’m still using this OS on my Internet box.
One possible problem with older hardware is that it may only have USB1.1 ports, in which case the transfer rate would be limited to around 1MB/s.
The following URLs have generic Win98SE drivers for USB mass storage devices.
http://www.technical-assistance.co.uk/kb/usbmsd98.php
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/43605-maximus-decim-native-usb-drivers/
http://www.wintricks.it/faq/usbpen98.html
http://www.wintricks.it/download/wtgenusb.zip
http://www.ehow.com/how_6691060_install-storage-device-windows-98.html
The 3.x version of the Maximus Decim driver set includes drivers for USB2.0 host controllers.
BTW, if you install the free KernelEx patch, then you will be able to run software that would normally require Win XP.
Just go to fleabay, and get something in the 60, 80, 120GB class, that capacity size was very very popular on the high end side of things when win98 was the bomb.
Windows 98’s 128GiB / 137GB HDD limitation only applies to internal IDE drives. USB HDDs can be much larger. In fact I’ve used a 320GB external drive on a Win98SE box.
You can also use large internal HDDs, but you will require a replacement for Microsoft’s ESDI_506.PDR driver.
Intel’s Application Accelerator provides >128GiB HDD support for certain chipsets:
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?ProductID=663&DwnldID=4857
Rudolph Loew provides an updated version of ESDI_506.PDR for $20:
http://rloew.limewebs.com/Programs/Patch137.htm
msfn.org provide a free, hacked version of ESDI_506.PDR:
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/78592-enable48bitlba-break-the-137gb-barrier/
