Boot Laptop/Tablet PC as External Drive
 

Tried to search, but didn't figure I'd find this one. Have a Toshiba Portege M200 Tablet PC running XP Tablet Ed. I use it in conjunction with my PowerMac running Leopard. Got the M200 'cause screened Wacoms start at $1000 and I got the M200 for $250 with 2gb RAM and Multi-Doc. Here's the rub, XP networking between with the Mac is hit-n-miss. Just don't want to be bothered with XP as an OS. If I could get all the apps I need on Linux I would go that route and running OSX86 is just not a sure thing for all the tablet features.

I draw up Key-Frame scenes for animations on the Tablet. I just want to boot the Tablet as an external drive to the PowerMac. USB or IEEE 1394 as I've added a Maxtor Firewire PCMCIA card. Now a Mac can do this, but the only tablet Mac is the 3rd party ModBook for $2000 - $6000. Not in this economy.

Anyway, it is a firmware/BIOS feature to boot a mac into "Target Disk Mode" and use it as an external drive under Mac OS (8.6 or later) or Windows. Have not heard of a WinTel motherboard that supports this feature and figured the only way it might be possible is through a stripped down version of Linux on a 2GB SD. Though I use a 4gb under XP with an HP driver, the M200 has an SD slot that can use a max 2GB sick.

So, anyone seen such a monster or have an idea how we might pull this one off? Sure would be nice to just get to my office, plug my M200 into the Multi-Doc, and see an external drive on the PowerMac.

You are running XP on the tablet, so that is good news. We have hope here. You can share the C:\ drive (or any other folder or drive on the tablet) by enabling 'Windows File and Print Sharing' and then using SAMBA to mount the filesystem on the Mac. That is the first option. If, for some reason, MacOS does not have SAMBA, and you are not willing to build it, you could always add the capability to run an NFS server on Windows. Microsoft had released "Windows Services for Unix" back when XP Professional was their 'golden child'. You might be able to find it as a download somewhere. (I have it on my netbook, but at work I cannot connect my netbook to the network or my computer without risking getting the netbook confiscated.) Alternatively, look for an Open Source NFS server. NFSAxe is one that I recall reading about. You install the NFS server on your XP box, then share the drive through NFS, and on the Mac, you just nfsmount the shared file path to a path on your system. I have not used Snow Leopard, or many other MacOS releases, but you should have no problem with finding the NFS client for the version of MacOS you are running.

The only thing I found was a dead Oracle project called endpoint.
http://oss.oracle.com/projects/endpoint/

Some form of network filesharing might be your only choice at the moment.