How to share USB drive indefinitely

How to share USB drive indefinitely

Permanent Sharing of USB Drive

Let us study first the sharing principles. Sharing a drive letter requires the drive is permanent. Sharing a ghost drive is not possible. Ghost means no actual drive is present. Using windows explorer how can you share a folder or a drive without the drive or folder existence? And if you use the Net Share command on your command line interface (CLI), sharing ghost drive will return an error: “The device or directory does not exist”.

One more thing is your drive letter was not permanent, if your USB device is plugged in your drive letter for that device is not predictable. Sometimes the drive starts with F even if your last drive letter is drive D. Or the drive letter adjusts if another device was inserted before your device. Those are the few reasons why removable drive cannot be shared permanently.

However, we have worked around for this issue. Our first option is to create an attorney. inf on your USB Flash Drive and a batch file to share your current USB Drive Letter.

Batch File

Create a batch file program using your text edit and save it into the root drive of your USB Flash Drive as shareme.bat. The batch file program should be like this:

@Echo off

Echo Sharing This USB Drive Automatically

echo Created by Cybert87 for TechyV.com

echo Date Created: June 25, 2011 – Saturday

echo.

Echo Current Driveis %~dp0

Echo Shared Name: USBDrv

Echo.

NET SHARE USBDrv=%~dp0

ECHO CURRENT SHARE AS FOLLOWS

NET SHARE

Pause

AUTORUN.INF

Create an autorun. inf and save it into the root directory of your USB Flash Drive. Autorun.inf must contain the following statements:

[autorun]

Open = shareme.bat

icon = OmitThisLineIfYouDontWantToDefineIcon.ico

label = NameYourUSBFlashDriveHere

When you insert your drive to the USB port of your computer it will automatically run the shareme.bat which is a batch file program sharing the current drive with the share name of USBDrv. You can access the shared drive to the other computer using the windows explorer or just type at the command prompt the command “net use \computernameUSBDrv.

The problem with these settings is when your computer or Antivirus prevents from running autorun.ini because more worms and Malware used the autorun.Inf to trigger the virus code. Please refer to your computer configuration to enable running of autorun.inf as well as in your Antivirus program.

One more alternative for this is to create use a system file called USBDLM or the USB Drive Letter Management. USBDLM is a third party Windows Management Service to manage and control the drive letter for your removal drives. Through this USB Drive Letter Manager, you can assign a drive letter for your removable drives this will also enable you to permanently share the drive. But sometimes this will not happen mostly on Windows XP below Service Pack 3 installed. You may acquire or download your copy at the following Internet address:

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html

According to USBDLM website, the USBDLM is for Windows 200 and Windows XP only. I have tried this into Windows 7 Home edition and it works great.

If you have a problem sharing your drive permanently, you may use our work around – the batch file. In every time you insert you’re Flash Drive into your USB port, just run the batch file on your desktop and he will do the shearing job. Since you can predict the drive letter of your USB Drive you can create a batch file on your desktop. Create a batch file on your desktop and name it as usbshare.bat or whatever name that fits your taste and put the following code in your batch file:

@Echo off

Echo Sharing This USB Drive Automatically

echo Created by Cybert87 for TechyV.com

echo Date Created: June 25, 2011 – Saturday

echo.

NET SHARE USBDrv=X:

ECHO CURRENT SHARE AS FOLLOWS

NET SHARE

pause

Note: X: is the drive letter you have assigned to your USB Drive.