Storage forum: external hard drives and Windows ME

I would just like to caution non-experts against buying an external hard drive if running Windows ME.

I bought one under the strong impression they were just "plug and play" and driverless. Be warned that they are formatted for XP, not ME, which uses a different file system. The manual said that if I didn't have XP I would need to use the supplied driver disk - that's fine, I have a little experience, however the drivers made my system unstable and it reached the point where my machine would not boot up fully and would display a blue screen of death if the external hard drive was connected.
Then later (too late !)the supplier told me to ignore the manual. Thanks for nothing guys.

Also during driver installation it was asking for files not on the driver disk, I eventually realised that it wanted files which were buried inside CAB files in my Win-ME installation CD, which the instructions never mentioned at all.

This is not a plea for help - I got rid of the damned thing - just a caution to Win-ME users that they should pay a computer shop to install the external hard drive rather than waste a whole afternoon trying to do it themselves.


Darren Robinson
moviesearch.com.au