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I want to take a physical disk (or part of a disk) from one machine, call it machine-A, and make it available to another machine, machine-B. But I don't want to map a network drive. I want it to appear to machine-B as a physical drive. Even though it is not a physical drive.

I want to do this in order to create shares on machine-B on that drive. Since I cannot do that on mapped drives, I need to use a utility that fools machine-B into thinking that it is a physical drive, and treats it as such.

Both of machines are Windows Server 2003.

I heard about NFS (Allegro NFS for Windows). It sounds like it could be the solution to my problem. Does it use a Linux/Unix protocol? What tools can I use? Are there open source solutions?

I don't care what the solution is, as long as I achieve my goal. I really would prefer an open source solution.

Ellie Kesselman
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7wp
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1 Answers1

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Does the drive on machine-a still need to be available on machine-a? If not you could serve it via iscsi from machine-a. Using an iscsi client on machine-b you will have the ability to share out folders. Here is an article that describes one option to make windows 2003 a iscsi target.

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Zoredache
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    For a 1:1 link you can even use the free versions of most popular iSCSI Target servers. – Mark Henderson Mar 09 '10 at 04:02
  • @zoredache , it would be an added benefit if the drive could be available on machine-a. But i'll dig a bit more on this iscsi subject and see if it could work for me. Thank you. I'm still open to any other ideas as well. – 7wp Mar 09 '10 at 04:09
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    I have created a config which uses iSCSI and leaves the drive visible and usable on the host but it caused a bunch of problems as each machine believes it has exclusive access to the drive and acts accordingly. – John Gardeniers Mar 09 '10 at 04:19