USB Mass Storage Device on Win 98SE 'Unable To Write'

Folks

I have the following spec PC:

Dell Dimension XPS T750r
128MB RAM
~134GB of diskspace
PhoenixBIOS 4.0 Release 6.0 (BIOS Version A11)
Windows 98SE (4.10.2222 A)

I have just purchased an external USB hard drive which currently holds a 160GB WD disk (2MB Cache, 7200rpm, 8.9ms average seek time).

I have used the external USB harddrive on another pc (Dell 2.3GHz, Windows 2000) and it works like a dream.

However, on the PC spec'ed above I get Blue Screens with the following:

"Unable To Write To Disk In Drive L:"
"Data Or Files May Be Lost"

When copying a batch of smaller files onto the drive this may take a while to occur, but copying a large file (160MB for my test file) it happens with a minute.

Strangely, copying similarly large files off the external drive seems to work okay (but is slow).

I noticed in the BIOS that the 'Legacy USB Support' attribute is set to 'Enabled'. I can see no other reference to USB.

In the Device Manager:
- the 'USB Root Hub' properties shows usbhub.sys as being Microsoft version 4.10.2222.
- the 'Hi-Speed USB-IDE Bridge Controller' shows PL2507S.PDR as 'Prolific Technology Inc' version 1.0.1.7


Are there known problems with USB on Windows 98SE?

What are my options? If I have to purchase a PCI USB card to get true USB2.0 then I would get a Firewire PCI card (which the external drive also supports).

Many thanks

gss

Sounds to me like you need to go over the drivers for the chipset. Thats where I would start. Somehow yer getting a USB issue. I would say also make sure you have all windows updates specifically any driver updates

I should add that I am successfully using USB for other activities (I have a USB DSL modem, USB printer and Sony MiniDisc (which is slow to download from PC to MD but does work)).

The error I get is the same that would occur if the USB cable were suddenly removed. Might gut feeling is that this is a capacity problem, that the USB external drive is overloading USB. The fact that it appears to work okay copying _from_ the external drive but not when copying _to_ it is a source of some suspicion to me...

I am not at the offending PC at the mo but will check the Dell site for any relevant updates this evening (Dublin time).

Many thanks

Gss

I have a feeling it could have to do with the size of your external HDD.

Read somewhere that there's a limit at the magic number of 137 GB (but don't remember whether that applied to Win98 SE or soemthing else).

Have you tried to partition the drive to get below that size?

Good luck
Chris

The external drive is partitioned up into 32GB FAT32 partitions

Yesterday I reinstalled Windows from scratch, did all the updates....still the same problem.

Today I bought a Firefire PCI card. I'm getting about 20Mbps through it copying off my hard disk, not great but at least it works.

Thanks for the help.


Gss