98SE not seeing Novatech External HDD

[WillyRose]

Took delivery of an excellent Novatech 500Gb External HDD yesterday.
My XP Pro laptop welcomed it with open arms but my 98SE desktop doesn't want to play.
There appear to be 3 eligible drivers on the accompanying CD:
o 6391 Win98 Driver
o JM20337_Win98 Driver &
o SPIF_215_98_Installer
Which to use? I've tried all 3 with similar results.

The laptop tells me the disk is a Samsung HD501LJ USB Device but there don't appear to be any Samsung drivers as I reach the end of my tether and try to add new hardware manually :?

Assuming I DO get it working with my desktop, do I need to partition the disk in chunks of < 500Gb?
XP Pro doesn't appear to provide a version of FDISK...

Any advice very gratefully received.
Regards,
Clive

[Ben]

HI,

I think the Max Disk size for WIN98 is something like 80 - 120GB possibly lower. This will need to formatted with the FAT32 file system for Win98 to read it. You can find FDISK on a WIN98 Bootdisk. Which are easy to find.

I think the drivers will just be for the USB interface, the drive itself, when it is partitioned correctly should be easily readable.

[WillyRose]

...You can find FDISK on a WIN98 Bootdisk...
Just to clarify... I copy FDISK from my WIN98SE machine and run it on my XP Pro laptop to format the external drive as FAT32?
Then the WIN98SE machine should see it via its USB port?

[Coops]

All our external HDD products are already formatted to FAT32.

Windows 98 requires drivers in order to work with USB external drives. However I am not sure of the correct driver and will need to look in to it.

XP obviously uses the default generic driver and thus works straight away.