Sharing Large Disks

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I have a drive larger than 137Gb (250Gb) attached to a PC that supports
LBA-48 with WinXP-SP2. The drive works fine.

I want to use the drive as a common backup drive for other PCs on my
network. But I am concerned about sharing this drive because the other PCs
do not support large drives natively. Are there any limitations to sharing
this drive on my network with other PCs that do not support LBA-48 and that
are running older versions of Windows - eg Win98, WinMe, etc. or does the PC
that the drive is attached to look after all that?

My guess is that the BIOS limitations of the other PCs are not a problem.
But I suspect that the version of Windows that they are running is a big
problem and that I could crash the big drive if I try to write beyond the
137Gb limit of these older OS's.

Anyone out there have any experience with this?
 
JLMann said:
I have a drive larger than 137Gb (250Gb) attached to a PC that
supports
LBA-48 with WinXP-SP2. The drive works fine.

I want to use the drive as a common backup drive for other PCs on my
network. But I am concerned about sharing this drive because the
other PCs
do not support large drives natively. Are there any limitations to
sharing this drive on my network with other PCs that do not support
LBA-48 and that
are running older versions of Windows - eg Win98, WinMe, etc. or does
the PC that the drive is attached to look after all that?

My guess is that the BIOS limitations of the other PCs are not a
problem. But I suspect that the version of Windows that they are
running is a big problem and that I could crash the big drive if I try
to write beyond the 137Gb limit of these older OS's.

Anyone out there have any experience with this?
Click to expand...

The limitations only apply to the pc in which the drive is installed.
You will be transferring data over TCP/IP so the fact that the data is
coming from a Win9x/ME box is irrelevant.

Malke
 
So how come my Windows ME machine knows how big all the other shared drives
are but can't figure out how big the 200G drive is? This implies it is
loading a FAT for the drive on the other PC.

Doesn't the OS still need to be able to understand the info it gets over
TCPIP? After all, I can open, edit and work on files on the shared drive.
 
Your not accessing the drive from a winME machine over a network. The
machine in which the drive is installed is accessing the drive.
Your interfacing through the network (or if you may through a network file
system)

This is why a win98 or winME machine which cannot use NTFS file system has
no problem accessing files on a WinXP using NFTS file system.
Note: A file which was on a NTFS file system being transferred to a
win98/WinME machine ends up as FAT32 on the win98/ME machine.
 
JLMann said:
So how come my Windows ME machine knows how big all the other shared
drives
are but can't figure out how big the 200G drive is? This implies it
is loading a FAT for the drive on the other PC.

Doesn't the OS still need to be able to understand the info it gets
over
TCPIP? After all, I can open, edit and work on files on the shared
drive.
Click to expand...

When you transfer data over a network, you are using the TCP/IP
protocol. Your target machine isn't "loading" a file system. This is
just like when you download a file from the Internet. You could be
downloading a file that is hosted on a machine running Linux or Unix or
a Mac and it will make no difference to your own computer. Likewise, it
doesn't matter what format the file is in for the transfer. I can
*transfer* a file from my Linux machine to one of my Windows machines
over the network. I will only run into a problem when trying to *open*
that file if it is in a format that Windows doesn't understand.

If you can open, edit and work on files on the shared drive, it is
because you have the same *program* installed on both machines. A
Win9x/ME machine will not be able to *locally* access files on a drive
that is formatted NTFS.

So, for your purposes - backup as I understand it - you can have a
backup program running on the XP box with the big drive gather data
from all the machines on your network and copy this data onto the
backup drive. Then you can burn the data to CD-R or DVD-R on some
regular basis. We do that all the time here, and have machines running
Windows 9x, XP, 2K, and SuSE Linux.

Malke
 
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