Greetings. I have a USB 2.0 External Hard drive formatting as NTFS. This external hard drive works great on my Win2K computer that I formatted it on, but my WinXP laptop simply freezes when I attach the device. Is there a way to re-install the "USB Mass Storage Device" drivers? Another consideration is that I installed some drivers that came with the external drive enclosure, which I later found out were intended for Win98, as it doesn't come with usable drivers. Any idea how I can remove theese? I am so frustrated, so any help is great! Thanks, Chris

First I would try to unistall the third party driver through the contol panel's Add or Remove Programs. The driver might not be there though. Instead you can open up Device Manager, open the USB devices, to find the one in question. Open up properties and click the driver tab. I would choose to update the driver, But you can try all those: Update, RollBack, Uninstall. My guess would be that your XP machine should be able to run the external hard drive fine without the third party driver. But if it does need a driver you should search around for one designed for XP.

in 9x you cant delete the driver in mormal mode unless the drive is plugged in. I dont know about xp but what you may have to do is boot into safe mode find the driver and remove it. windows remembers USB devices so that it will install the remembered driver no matter if you change the driver without the device plugged in. so if you cant find the driver in normal mod try safe mode.

Thanks for the quick replies; I like this forum. There is nothing for my device under Add/Remove Programs, and under USB controllers under Device Manager, I have no idea which one(s), if any, pertain to my external drive. I know for a fact that XP does NOT need 3rd party drivers; the issue (I think) is removing the old drivers I accidentally installed, that may be interfering with XP's native support for USB Mass Storage Devices. Thanks again, Chris

An additional note: I did get the external hard drive working fine under Win2K without installing any 3rd party drivers. Therefore I know that there is no need for drivers other than what Windows provides. Any ideas of how to remove old, accidentally installed driver? Thanks