[johnfair]

I have an old dell inspiron 3000 with 266 mhx running 98se. Does anyone know if I can use something like a western digital 250 gig external hard drive to store data -- off the usb hub. I see them advertised but it seems too good to be true for my old machine I have a 1.1 usb not the newer 2 thanks

 

[Ageclipsegt]

keep in mind it would be very slow transferring data on the old USB. You could 'probably' use it, but getting data would take time, so don't try to run a program or something off of it, but if you were just storing songs or files it would probably be ok.

unless the drive said USB 2.0 only or something.

 

[magnethead]

you can do it. BUT BUT BUT there is one thing- the external MUST be formatted to FAT32. I can't remember for sure, but I dont believe 98 had the logical disk manager- so if you plug in an NTFS or unformatted disk, the computer wont recognize it at all for you to format, or if it's NTFS, windows will ignore it completely. PLUS, being a 250 GB, windows 2K/XP/Vista WILL NOT format it as FAT32. The software that comes with the hard drive MIGHT have a program included on CD that will allow you to format it as FAT32 with the high capacity, but that program MAY or MAY NOT work with 98. 98 is a very old operating system nowadays (microsoft is cutting XP support next year i believe, for comparison), being 10 years old. The way I formatted my 120 GB external to FAT32 was I booted to ubuntu (which i have on hard drive to boot to) and ran gparted as a sudo user. But that's a whole other process.......