(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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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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