[SOLVED] can I export a laptop's partition as an external HD?
 

Hello list. I'm wandering if it is possible to set up a partition on a laptop's HD so that if I use a USB cable between it and another device, the partition would appear as an external HD on the device.

Old Mac laptops used to have the option at boot-time of sharing the hardrive via firewire (they might still have it, have no clue) I'm looking for something similar, but on a laptop with Linux running on a different partition.

Cheers,

R.

I don't know if this is exactly you are looking for but NFS (Network File System) or Samba might be interesting for you...

Afaik you will not be able to do that via USB. You could use protocols like AOE, nbd or iscsi to export it over the network to the other device.
Really depends on the other devices' OS though, e.g. if it has an implementation of the a.m. protocols. Iscsi at least is very common on many operating systems.

In a nutshell, USB hardware works differently then Firewire. In simple terms Firewire is peer to peer where as you can connect any device together and communicate between them but USB requires a host controller that talks to a peripheral device ( i.e master/slave). This means you can not directly connect to computers together via a USB cable. You would also short out the 5V power but that is another issue. There are special USB cables (Data transfer) but these create a network between two computers which is not what you are asking about. As stated there are many ways to share data.

Thanks, that's what I was asking: whether I could emulate the host controller of a flash drive under linux. I didn't see any reason not to, unless there was some hardware issue with the standard USB port/cable:
That's what I was hoping wouldn't happen :)
Thanks for the reply, I guess I'll have to wait for my router until I can set up a network.

Cheers,

R.