Adding USB Storage Device to Win98 W/O Driver?

[stewbidasso]

Hello,

I just recently got an old touchscreen computer that has Win98 installed on it. The catch is, the system does not have any external storage devices (like floppy disk, CD, DVD, etc...), only the internal hard drive. It does have a USB port on it, but because it's running Win98, I can't install any external drives because they require a driver be installed, and as I stated above, don't have any way to install a driver since I don't have any external storage devices.

Does anyone have any suggestions about how I could add a device to this computer (doesn't have to be a permanent solution, just enough to at least install drivers for other more permanent solutions). All of the USB Pen Drives I've looked at require a driver for Win98. Am I just totally stuck?

 

[brady]

It doesn't say it, but Im assuming you have no internet right ?

 

[stewbidasso]

Yeah, no internet. I have a USB wireless adapter once I can install the driver for it

 

[Hefemeister]

can you pull the hd, hook it up as a slave on another computer and put the drivers you need on it that way?

 

[stewbidasso]

That's probably a great idea, I'll have to see if I can. It's not a normal computer, it was originally used for medical stuff. Here is one on ebay:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Panasonic-LCD-t...ryZ80193QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

That is exactly what I have. I'll have to see if I can get in the case and see what it's like in there.

 

[stewbidasso]

I took it apart last night, and it had laptop parts in it. I went to staples, radio shack, and best buy looking for a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter so I could hook the hard drive up to my desktop, but none of them had one, so I ordered one off of ebay (I'll have to wait a week for it to come).

I have no experience with this stuff, so I'll throw this out there, do you think it would be bad to upgrade the operating system when I hook it up to my desktop? I am not sure if that would break the touchscreen ability (I'm guessing it has a driver for it, but I'm not sure). Is there a way to extract the driver so I can re-install it on a new operating system? Is there a way to make an image of the current hard disk, then play around upgrading OS's etc... and then if it doesn't work out, reload the image onto the disk? I'm sorry if these are basic questions, I just don't want to break the thing.

 

[Inaris]

if you upgrade the OS, the drivers will change. I would look on the vendor site for updated drivers and see if they are avaialble before updating. Otherwise, I might not recomend upgrading it, if you cant find the drivers for another OS. Additionally, if you install on the hard disk in another machine, it's going to have problems when you boot it in the new system. Best thing to do, would be to format the drive in Fat32 with the /s switch, and copy the contents of the disk to the drive, then install it from the disk. The disk should boot and allow you to run i386\setup.exe

at least I think it should...