(OT) Portable USB drive (makes no sense)

Paintedcow · 2016-05-01T23:31:06+00:00

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!

May 01, 2016 24 Replies

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Mark Lloyd 10 years ago

[snip]

FAT32 allows up to 2TB (possibly more with larger sectors). FAT will waste a lot of space when formatted to near maximum capacity (large clusters), and your format program may refuse to allow this.

IIRC, I've heard of Windows having problems with multiple partitions on a removable drive.

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Stormin Mormon 10 years ago

Center posted, as a courtesy.

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Sam E 10 years ago

[snip]

This may be the first time I've seen a reply in the middle of a WORD of the quoted text.

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Terry Coombs 10 years ago

That's just the Stormin' Moron seeking attention .

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Neill Massello 10 years ago

Yes, but it won't write to it without it has some additional (non-Apple) software. A modern Mac can read and write FAT (including FAT32), exFAT, and HFS+ (its native file system).

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