On Sun, 1 May 2016 18:00:55 -0700 (PDT), bob_villain
wrote:

On Sunday, May 1, 2016 at 7:50:34 PM UTC-5, wrote:
On Sun, 1 May 2016 17:40:22 -0700 (PDT), bob_villain
wrote:

On Sunday, May 1, 2016 at 7:31:15 PM UTC-5, wrote:
I just bought one of those portable USB hard drives that plug into a USB
port. It's a 1tb made by Western Digital. (Passport Drive). It says its
for Windows Vista, 7 and 8. (It was on clearance so Win10 is not
included). Anyhow, my newest OS is XP. I plugged it into my XP machine
and it was immediately recognized. So, I dont need Vista or newer. It
works fine on XP. But it comes with included software. Maybe that
software requires Vista ir higher, but I never use any of that included
software anyhow.

However there is one peculiar thing, which makes no sense. The driver
for it, is *ON* the drive. So, if I actually needed the driver, how the
heck can I get to it. That's pretty stupid.

Just to see what would happen, I plugged it into my older computer with
Windows 98 and 2000. I did not even try it using Win98 because 98 lacks
support for most USB devices, regardless of their size or age. But
booting it to Win2000, I was suspecting I would need to take that driver
off of it from the XP machine, and place it on the 2K computer. Much to
my surprise, after stumbling around for a minute, then asking for a
driver, I just hit cancel, and I had full access to that drive.

So, first I asked what good the driver is when it's on the drive I'm
trying to use. Now I ask what's the purpose of the driver all all, since
I accessed the drive from both Windows 2K and XP.

This drive is also for Macintosh. I thought a Mac computer requires a
different drive format. That's even more puzzling!

Any OS will "look" for a driver in the "usual" places (likely folders)...if it doesn't find a driver you have to point it in the right direction...on the USB drive itself. Win98 had fairly good USB support...95 did not.

The problem with W98 is it won't talk to a NTFS drive. I agree with
the OP, they are referring to the bundled software and it might run on
XP anyway. I always wipe that stuff out too.

He was asking about drivers and I wasn't commenting on included software...

The mass store driver is in XP already. On W98 you need to install
nusb33e.exe or some other similar driver.
When you plug in a drive on the USB, you see it loading the driver but
that is coming from c:\Windows\system32 or maybe another similar
location