Looking for Win98se driver for Gateway 32mb USB pen drive

[jyates]

Hey all,

I've got a friend who has a Gateway USB 32mb pen drive and the only thing on it
is "Gateway". I've checked out the Gateway website and they have drivers for
XP and 2000 for it but no drivers for Win98se (that is what he is running).

I did a search on the web and it looks like others are having the same problem.

Gateway puts these things out and doesn't tell you who actually made them so you
don't have a clue where to look for the drivers for the drive.

Anyone have any ideas?

I thought about prying the plastic casing off and looking for chip numbers and the
such but I hated to have to do that.

Thanks,
Jim

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, Try "DriverGuide". Free signup. If anyone has found it it might be there. Jim

 

[jyates]

Hi Jim,

I tried there first and googled and no help.
It appears that several other people have
had this problem with the Gateway pen drives
and there was no answer for any of them either.

I told my friend to go and buy one that had win98se
drivers and throw the gateway one to the side and use
it with xp if he ever has an xp machine.

Just makes me love Gateway even less than I already did.

 

[TeeJay1952]

USB is an add on for Win98. It wasn't OEM till WinME. I have struggled over the years, many times with many devices with Win98 USB. It can be a royal pain getting USB to work in Win98. If you Google it you will find not one answer but many to USB on Win98.

 

[jyates]

The problem is that with the way Gateway OEM's the pen drive
there is no way of knowing who actually made it and Gateway
doesn't offer drivers for the device for Win98se.

I saw a lot of questions and answers about USB devices
but no answers for this particular product.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: TeeJay1952
USB is an add on for Win98. It wasn't OEM till WinME.

No, Win98 and Win98se both support USB. The problem is in-built support for the "USB MASS STORAGE" device-class in the driver stack, IIRC. Similar deal with using a USB floppy in Win98se. At least for USB floppy support, you had to copy a few driver files from W2K over to Win98se to get it to work. (Interestingly enough, those files already had Win9x sections in the .INF - like they were designed for Win98se in the first place, but simply never included.)

Originally posted by: TeeJay1952
I have struggled over the years, many times with many devices with Win98 USB. It can be a royal pain getting USB to work in Win98. If you Google it you will find not one answer but many to USB on Win98.

True, Win98se's USB support is still no-where near XP's USB support, and W2K's USB support is somewhere in-better. (Good support for generic mass-storage devices, bad support for things like USB printers.)

Edit: I would install the drive, and let Win98se finish installing it as an "Unknown device" (or maybe "Unknown USB device"? I forget.) Start REGEDIT.EXE, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum, and then drill down and find the "Unknown" device, and then look for the device-ID string, it should have some numbers, like PCI device-IDs, and then use those to search on Google, for a proper .INF / driver package. Either that, or you could just try half-a-dozen different vendor's Win98se USB flash drive drivers, and see if they work or not. It's likely that Gateway uses the same OEM mfg that at least one of the other branded sellers of USB flash drives does.

 

[jyates]

Thanks for the tip....I'll check out your suggestions.