Have a Tosh Notebook with a working floppy drive. No OS,dead internal cd drive. using the moto hairu drivers can 'see' external usb maxtor HD but has no drive letter. the config.sys file is device=USBASPI1.SYS /v device=Di1000dd.SYS lastdrive=Z how do i get a drive letter assigned? any comments (esp starting 'its actually very simple....') most welcome. thanks! Why do Kamikaze pilots wear helmets?

You can not install "MS-DOS and compatible" on External USB Hard Drive unless the BIOS has that feature, anyway DOS can be run from floppy disk! If you are wanting to install Windows, try a Windows forum.

Let me be clearer I want to be able to access my data on the external HD the bios has native support for usb am not interested in installing windows or any OS- just getting my data from the HD I can see that the drivers are recognising the HD on boot up, but cannot work out how to assign the drive a 'letter' so that I can use a simple dir command from dos to get to the data many thanks for the comments anyway. Upgrader since VIC-20, I mean 286 Colt and Windows 3.0. Electric technician. Not over-clocker.

Any Windows O/S W98SE and later can read a USB drive, though if it is not FAT32 but NTFS you need W2K/XP. As to assigning a drive letter with the DIxxxx driver it does so automatically if the drive is able to be correctly recognised by this driver. The Panasonic USB ASPI driver just reads the Contoller Chip PiD and states that a device is present: http://83.67.55.228/usbfire.htm

If the external hard drive is formatted FAT32 then DOS will not assign a drive letter.

I thought MS DOS>7.1 supported FAT32 ? Why do Kamikaze pilots wear helmets?

No M$ standalone version supports FAT32 - you failed to mention you were using the (so called) "7.1" There really is no way to assign a hard drive a letter using DOS - that is done automatically, if the drive is recognized by the BIOS and by the OS "Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something."