Greetings: I am trying to connect a Western Digital external hard drive to a Win98SE machine. I have tried the driver that came with the drive and downloaded a different(?) driver from the WD site. In each case, the driver fails to load. The error message is, paraphrasing: The NTKERN.VXD device loader can't load USBSTOR.SYS and USBNTMAP.SYS. I have looked around a bit and see this is a common problem, as are Win98SE/USB problems generally. Based on forum posts, I downloaded the two files in question - extracted from Windows ME systems - and inserted them. They load but then cause a BSOD. I can't find Win98SE versions of those files and don't know what to try next. Any ideas? Ed

I'm no expert on external drives but as a very long shot you could try extracting ntkern.vxd from your W98SE CD and putting it into c:\windows\system\vmm32 It is in Win98_54.cab on the CD. This file is already contained (compressed) within vmm32.vxd but it you put it into the vmm32 folder as well your system will choose that one first. It will do no harm and you can delete it any time it if it doesn't help. As an aside (because I happened to mention it), take a copy of the vmm32.vxd file on your system and put it onto a floppy. If that file ever goes wonky/missing it might save you a Windows reload. DerekW

Thanks for the effort, Derek. However, the problem is not with the ntkern.vxd loader, but rather that it can't find the two .sys files. I don't see them anywhere either. That's why I downloaded the WinME versions. That was a cure for other users experiencing similar problems. So why it causes a BSOD on this system is not clear. It may be that there is a conflict with some other driver. Ed

For what it's worth, I did a search for USBSTOR.SYS and USBNTMAP.SYS on the win98, win98SE, winXP Home and WinXP Pro Install Cds and they weren't found. That would tend to indicate that they should have come with the drivers. Do yourself a favor BACKUP!

First of all do your USB 2.0 ports work with other hardware? Install the drivers BEFORE connecting the drive. Don't connect the drive until after the computer has fully booted. If you connect and then boot, the drive assignment gets shuffled and causes problems.