Share on External Firewire drive disappears

[Guest]

I've seen other posts about this, but they don't seem to have been resolved,
so am interested to see again if anyone has a clue about this.

I have an external (firewire) HD plugged into one machine on my home
network. I want that to be accessible from my other machines for backup
purposes. I can create a share and all works fine, but after a few times
removing the drive and plugging it back in, the share disappears (it might be
that this happens only after a reboot; not sure about that).

I am using XP SP2, and *not* simple file sharing.

Does anyone know either:

(1) how to make a share on an external HD persist across un/reconnections
and/or reboots

or alternatively

(2) how to write a .vbs that will run automatically on plugging the drive
in, which creates the share if it doesn't exist.

Cheers.

 

[Guest]

Just worth adding that the external drive also has no default ($) share. Is
this always the case for external drives? I'd be quite happy to use a path
via the default share as an alternative to a persistent named share if
necessary.

(for some reason my display name has changed, but I am the OP here).