Windows 98 & USB Drives
This weekend my sister decided that, since her and her husband are now starting their new life in sunny Starkville, MS, they finally had space for her computer in their new place. They had been using his computer for a while, and she wanted hers back. My dad and I spent a little while collecting all the parts again from storage, and reassembled it.
I almost drowned in the nostalgia as the 255Mhz 64M Ram machine booted up Windows 98SE. I hadn’t seen that cheery blue sky in a long time. Without much fanfare it booted up and waited for commands. We quickly plugged in the network connection, and found that the Virus Definitions were approximately 941 days old, ouch. She was running McAfee Virusscan 7, which they don’t even support anymore (McAfee is pushing v10 now). We did our best, and the system seems fairly usable now, aside from the speed.
The real surprise was when we tried to use a USB key with it. My dad grabbed one laying around, and we popped it in. Of course, Windows 98 doesn’t really support USB, so we were prepared to install drivers for every device. We went to Sandisk’s website and downloaded the drivers for the Cruzer Micro for 98SE. Just like the instructions say, they installed quickly and we rebooted. Only, to our surprise, when we inserted the USB key it still didn’t recognize the device. We tried all the old tricks, telling it to search for possible drivers in the downloaded directory, in “C:WindowsSystem”, in “C:WindowsInf”, but nothing worked. We tried re-installing the drivers and several other things, before my dad did the unthinkable: He called Technical Support. I know, take a second to catch your breath. I was surprised that my dad did it too, but I didn’t have the chance to stop him. But once he did, I was glad because what we heard really surprised me. Didn’t take long on the phone before we got the real truth: Sandisk doesn’t support 98SE. Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that.
If you look closely, you’ll see the driver is for the “SDCZ4″, while we were using the “SDCZ6″. What’s the difference, you ask? The difference is that the Z6 model has “U3 Technology”, and SanDisk doesn’t support anything on 98SE with U3 Technology. At this point, we gave up and hung up the phone. But I was confused, what is “U3 Technology” and why is it so troublesome for 98SE? Well, I’ve dug around the net and I’m still not sure. From what I can find, the U3 Platform is a method of allowing software to run directly from USB Drives. Ok, that’s nice and all, but what makes it so special? I’ve installed plenty of software on my USB Key (Password Safe, Putty, Firefox) and never seen anything special (fyi: I have a Sony MicroVault, which according to their website is not U3 compatible). From reading their FAQ, it seems this U3 Technology is just some “Launchpad” software that’s pre-loaded on the key at the factory. This software has some special features for integration with certain “U3 Aware” applications. In short, it seems this is nothing more than some fancy “USB Autorun” code and some file synchronization. And, of course, it only runs on Win 2k (SP3+) and WinXP, not on 98.
So the lack of drivers for Windows 98SE is not a technical or hardware limitation. They just want to push their U3 Software, which is probably loaded with monitoring & spyware-type features, and it’s not compatible with 98SE so they just dropped support. I don’t fault SanDisk for dropping support for antiquated operating systems, but technically 98 is still a supported OS by Microsoft for another month. I really suspect that, hardware-wise, the Z4 and Z6 are virtually identical. In fact, the Z4 drivers will probably work, if only we can figure out how to convince Windows to map the driver to the device (Yet another reason why proprietary systems suck). I honestly can’t say much about the U3 Launchpad software since a) My dad (smartly) formatted the key as soon as he got it, and b) the software is not available for download. It all sounds pretty fishy to me, so I’m just gonna do my best to avoid it, and I recommend you do the same.
[tag:windows98][tag:microsoft][tag:sandisk][tag:usb]
Update 10/29/06: Check the comments and you’ll see that someone claims to have gotten a generic driver working with the Z6 model in Windows 98se, and they’ve posted the driver on DriversGuide.com. Unfortunately they require a (free) registration (spam central I’m sure) to get it, so I’ve not verified it. If someone will send me a reg-free link, or just send me the drivers via email or something, I’ll post a link.
Update 11/17/2005 Just got another piece of information, evidently the drivers shown at http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=43605 seem to work with pretty much any USB Drive on Windows 98SE, including the Sandisk SDCZ6. It’s a homegrown driver with minimal support or guarantee, but if your alternative is “nada” then what ya got to lose?
