Cruzer Titanium USB drive on NEC 900c - anyone?

Has anyone gotten a SanDisk Cruzer Titanium 512 Meg USB drive to mount on an NEC MobilePro 900c, running WinCE .NET? Or have any suggestion regarding where I might find a driver that I could use? Or a registry hack?

I have a vague recollection of someone mentioning getting a USB driver update from NECSAM or somewhere, but can find nothing on their site, and a quick search here didn't prove helpful (other than the thread on getting SanDisk WiFi/128 meg combo working on a j720. I've yet to try it.)

Anyway, I love the little Cruzer, but would like it to mount to the NEC to "be a useful engine."

Any help is appreciated.

Tip

It's just a pen type USB flash drive...correct? Shouldn't need any drivers, just plug it in and it's there. At least that's what happens with all of my pen drives on my unit. I have half a dozen USB drives from all manufacturers, PNY, GeekSquad, SanDisk, etc...they all work the same for me.

If you tap on the "my computer" icon, you will see it listed as a folder just like the Internal Disk folder, except it is named "Hard Disk."

Rich

Hi, Rich -

It is a pen-type drive but unlike my other one, it doesn't just show up. I don't know if you remember my discussion thread over on PocketPC mag forum regarding my Seagate 5-gig pocket drive, but it seems to function similarly to that (meaning mostly that it doesn't.)

I plug it in, the little blue light flashes, but the drive doesn't mount. Just like my pocket drive, it comes with some backup software on it. When reading up on USB stuff at Microsoft's dev site, it says something about the USB spec being such that the drivers for the device can be loaded on insertion, so here is my guess:

Most pen drives use a generic driver which is compatible with CE. Some drives that try to add functionality to the drive (like backup software) may require additional support in a driver not provided by the generic one, so they write their own, which gets loaded when the device is inserted per MS spec, but unfortunately, it isn't supported by CE.

This is just a guess, (or hypothesis, if you want to get fancy.) It seems to support my experience of "some work - some don't." Still, I'm hoping someone brighter than I can confirm and point me to another driver for CE that has a chance of working. I think I can edit the registry to point to the new driver.

Anyone?

I've been reading reviews and comments about this particular flash drive...seems it is very sensitive to power availability. If you have an multiport USB hub that is externally powered, plug it in there and see what happens.

Also the 3 programs that come with the device, the security, backup and mini-Outlook program are desktop applications and don't run on the WinCE OS, nor should they prevent you from accessing the pen drive.

Rich

Excellent, thanks, Rich. That's good info. I appreciate you looking into it. I don't have a powered hub, but will look into finding one to borrow and report back.

Tip