Mounting Virtual Drives as Physical Drives in Windows?
Bombcar asks: "Samba 3.0 is an excellent CIFS server, but there are some limitations. For one, you can get a networked mapped drive, but some programs (Oracle, Exchange) refuse to run on a mapped drive, but only on local drives. I know there are some closed source (read: expensive) drivers that allow a SMB share to appear to be a physical disk. Is there any equivalent in the OSS community? What I want to be able to do is mount a share from a Linux server under Windows 2000 and have it appear as if it were a local disk. This will allow many programs that refuse (for what ever reason) to use anything but physical drives to access the network." Might such software be seen as a 'circumvention device' as specified by the DMCA? The submittor mentions that there are companies in this market already, but that doesn't mean that it will remain safe.
There is an excellent command-line GNU tool out there called FileDisk, by Bo Branten.
FileDisk is "a virtual disk driver for Windows NT/2000/XP that uses one or more files to emulate physical disks." ("files", meaning disk images)
His homepage at http://www.acc.umu.se/~bosse/ seems to be down at the moment, or maybe I'm just DOS'ing myself.
I'm sure you can find it somewhere out on the 'net, I did only a week ago.
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