USB Windows NT

garred

Sorry guys if its been asked before. I was looking for a patch giving USB support for Windows NT, upgrading to win 2000, XP, etc is not an option at the moment. I have seen a few when googling but they are pay (was hoping to test it out first as I have heard some of these solutions can be tempremental). Are there any "freebie downloads" and if not which do you think would be the best of the pay solutions.

Cheers in advance.

Capt'n Midnight

Nope.

There are no generic usb drivers for NT because of the way the OS was designed, very little access to ports. NT4 came out about the same time Intel & Co. started shipping motherboards with USB on board.

Windows 95 allows more HW access and if you go to OSR2 and put in all the patches USB support is barely there and more or less only for devices that have a windows 95 driver. Even with windows 98 you have to goto SE (ie Windows 95 V4) before you get resonable support for many USB devices and even then you need a driver.

There were a few "point enabler" type drivers for NT for a few specific devices, but I've never heard of anyone actually buying one, maybe some corporate/military customers..

As for the PAY ones check the reviews and check they will also provide drivers for the devices they have. Keyboards,mice and floppy drives may be handled by a LEGACY option in the BIOS.

What HW are you trying to run ?

If only used infrequently then booting off something like a Knoppix CD will allow you to copy files to / from USB storage devices. But linux support for uncommon USB devices is slight.

garred

Thanks for the reply Captain. Its for public access machines, they want to enable the users use of their thumb drives. As these drives would be different manufacturers I was hopefully looking for some generic tweak for NT that would pick up the thumb drive as 2000/XP does.

duridian

Dell have a driver download that will allow a somewhat limited usage of USB in NT4. Came across this some time ago when messing with ye olde system It works with a good few USB controllers and is not Dell only but as I said it is somewhat limited. I did manage to get a few simpler USB devices to work using this eg. USB floppy drive. didn't try any USB printer so I don't know how much use it is if that is what you need USB for.
Anyway here is the link to the download, give it a try sure, it might work for the job you have in mind:
http://ftp1.us.dell.com/utility/R62200.EXE

(PS. here is where I heard of it in case you are worried about d/l an exe file. http://www.computing.net/windowsnt/wwwboard/forum/22296.html)

garred

Thanks Duridian will give it a whirl:)

gamer

If u do google search, usb dos driver, u can get 1 generic driver to use in dos mode, but u need to be a REAL techie, to install it ,they may,need to go to dos prompt, to transfer files to the usbdrive.I think theres detailed info on bootdisk .com , usb section.

Capt'n Midnight

gamer wrote:

If u do google search, usb dos driver, u can get 1 generic driver to use in dos mode, but u need to be a REAL techie, to install it ,they may,need to go to dos prompt, to transfer files to the usbdrive.I think theres detailed info on bootdisk .com , usb section.

/me pulls up chair very intrested to see how someone will get DOS USB driver working in an NT command prompt.

This thread is very similar to our one here - with a few more links
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/WinNT/Q_20009992.html

A quick google for R62200 gives
Now all you need are some NT4 USB drivers, I suggest these as I have used em forever and they never let me down. http//ftp.1.us.dell.com/utility/R62200.EXE use these and make sure you have installed SP6a first, also during the install do not install digital camera drivers, other than that you will end up with NT4 running USB sweet as a nut.

& download the R62200.exe which is a USB driver for NT. It works with USB flash drives but not sure if it works USB Hard Drives. I tried it with a 40G USB drive and couldn't get it to work. May be you'll have better luck.

Dos driver links http://www.computing.net/dos/wwwboard/forum/13679.html

Stephen

would it be possible to upgrade the NT4 boxes to Windows 2000? You'd have full USB 2.0 support then.