I recovered a legacy /very old/ ImageMate Sandisk Reader with USB connection
in my Lab , containing 16yr old info I needed to extract.
The old driver disk indicated late 1990’s origin.
The driver update indicated last stable version was 2002 and ended in XP support.
To recover about 2 dozen images on these elderly 8MB and 32MB Smart Media cards
that predate every other type of flash memory by years,
I had to
-> load a VIRTUAL XP SP3 load into Oracle VirtualBox running under Win10/8.1/7
-> load the USB extensions for that virtualized OS
-> load and unzip the old SanDisk driver package (I have V 5.xx) archive into a TEMP directory (inside the virtual XP)
-> execute “setup.exe” before plugging in the SanDisk ImageMate USB “teardrop shape” reader
-> that utility loaded SDSTOR2K and SDSTRWDM system files (in the virtual XP)
-> direct VirtualBox to connect SanDisk ImageMate to USB port (hey, Windows7 already ID’d the HW!)
-> when XP prompts for DRIVER, I directed Windows XP to look in c:\windows\system or \system32
It took long XP minutes for the ImageMate to install and then another drive letter appeared!!
I then extracted the image files and data off the legacy cards for transfer out of the Virtual Box OS.
Another use for Virtualization!
Hint:
Users will NOT be able to force WIN7 and UP to accept the older SYS driver and DLL set for this very very old thing.
I have the 2002 complete Diskette content for the driver which will load into XP SP3.
I have to ZIP archive the whole set because SandDisk support will not have an archive of these driver files.
please email me if the following link is bad
SANDISK IMAGEMATE 2002 Floppies (4Megs)
Again: these files are for Win95/98/2K and XP. You have to run a virtual XP in Win7/8+/10 to get the
hardware and software to connect
I can tell you Sandisk Support has come up with the wrong answers because most of them were infants
when this hardware was in wide use .
