I just bought a Fujitsu HandyDrive (a 30GB USB bus-powered removable/external hard drive) for casual office backups - I have attached it to one of the XP machines and shared it (Windows peer networking) so that the other machines in the office can map it and write to it.
Removing and re-plugging the device yesterday still resulted in it being shared and available again(when connected), but when the host machine was restarted this morning, it has forgotten all about the share.
I didn’t try plugging it in before powering up the machine (to see if the share persists this way), but this would not be convenient anyway, as the host PC is sometimes used before the backup trustee gets to work.
Is there any way to persistently share removable drives in Windows XP?
You could create a .bat file with the appropriate net share command (type net share /? at the command line for a list of all the arguments), then add a shortcut to it to that particular user’s Startup folder. This would only work if the drive was plugged in when the user logged on, though.
Alternatively you could make a shortcut to the batch file on the backup trustee’s desktop and have them double-click it when they want to share the drive.
Windows XP prompted me for an action when it saw the drive today (presumably because it had some files on it this time) - I wonder if I could use an Autorun.inf file on the disk itself to run a batch file…
Does a pretty little icon appear on your taskbar when its plugged in? You have to click on that & let it know you want to take it out of the machine sometimes, so it can keep track of things.
Yes, an icon appears and you’re supposed to click it before disconnecting the drive, but it makes no difference - when the computer wakes up agina, it does not restore the share.
NET SHARE Backup=q: works though, I just can’t get it to auto-run when the drive appears, but a shortcut on the desktop to a batch file will have to suffice.