Windows 98 SE on VB - usb keys etc not seen.

adigraham · Post by **adigraham** » 13. Jan 2009, 18:21

Hi all,

I have trawled the forums on this but one last attempt before I threw the idea out of the window!

I have created a Win98 SE VB all standard. When I plug in a usb key or drive and add to the filter list, it will still not be seen by Win98?

Any help appreciated

Thanks

Adi

Post by **ghr** » 13. Jan 2009, 21:42

Win98 does not recognize USB devices out of the box as e.g. XP does, typically you need a driver...

adigraham · Post by **adigraham** » 13. Jan 2009, 21:50

Hi i tried one and no joy

http://www.virtualbox.de/wiki/User_FAQ · Post by **stefan.becker** » 13. Jan 2009, 22:34

Use Windows Shares/Samba.

adigraham · Post by **adigraham** » 14. Jan 2009, 13:07

Thats not going to help matey as this is for a car tuning company who use usb diagnostic equipment

Post by **mpack** » 14. Jan 2009, 14:02

Why did you use Win98 for this? Normally people would try something like this because it's an old device which only has Win98 drivers - but that doesn't seem to be true in your case?

Win98 support for USB was always poor - that was my main reason for switching from Win98 to XP way back when (I discovered other good reasons only after the switch).

I would have thought an XP VM was a better bet for you.

adigraham · Post by **adigraham** » 14. Jan 2009, 14:08

I would agree mate, but this software is old school and only runs on win98 .. although i could try compatibility mode ...

Post by **Sasquatch** » 15. Jan 2009, 00:10

Did you also enable USB (and let the USB 2 option OFF), then add a filter for the USB device and check again? Maybe the USB controller is simply not installed in 98.

Post by **ghr** » 15. Jan 2009, 19:13

If the USB controller IS installed it wil show up in Device Manager as USB Controllers (components: Universal Host Controller & Root Hub); in order to get that installed Win98 must detect USB hardware first... I hope you got that far ?

Post by **mpack** » 15. Jan 2009, 21:04

adigraham wrote:although i could try compatibility mode ...

If you can possibly get it to work in an XP VM then I would thoroughly recommend that you do so, since VBox's support for XP guests is much better than its support for Win98. The VM will perform much more smoothly, and you'll be able to install guest additions (hence seamless mouse integration and shared folders). Plus USB support is much better in XP.

In fact I've never had a problem running any old software on XP, except maybe the odd crash from really old Win16 apps. NT4 apps sometimes need a compatibility mode (only because they do an OS version check and then refuse to run), a WDM device driver for a funny PCI card worked fine in XP, I can only think of one Win98 app that even needed a compatibility mode: and that because it did strange things with certain Windows "common dialogs" which had changed a lot in XP.