Make a drive from one machine appear as a physical disk in another machine.

I want to take a physical disk (or part of a disk) in one machine (call it machine-A) and I want to make it available in another machine (machine-B). But I don't want to map a network drive. I want it to appear in machine-B as a physical drive. Even though it is not a physical drive.

The reason I want to do this is i want the ability to create shares in machine-B on that drive. Since I cannot do that on mapped drives, I need to use some utility that fools machine-B to think that it is a physical drive, and treat it as such.

Both of these machines are windows server 2003.

I heard about NFS (Allegro NFS for Windows), It sounds like what could be the solution to my problem. But isn't that a Linux/Unix protocol? What tools can I use to make this happen? Are there any open source solutions?

I don't care what the solution is, as long as it achieves the end result, preferably open source solution though.

Thanks for reading guys and gals!

From serverfault Roberto Sebestyen

• Does the drive on machine-a still need to be available on machine-a? If not you could serve it via iscsi from machine-a. Using an iscsi client on machine-b you will have the ability to share out folders. Here is an article that describes one option to make windows 2003 a iscsi target.

  Farseeker : For a 1:1 link you can even use the free versions of most popular iSCSI Target servers.

  Roberto Sebestyen : @zoredache , it would be an added benefit if the drive could be available on machine-a. But i'll dig a bit more on this iscsi subject and see if it could work for me. Thank you. I'm still open to any other ideas as well.

  John Gardeniers : I have created a config which uses iSCSI and leaves the drive visible and usable on the host but it caused a bunch of problems as each machine believes it has exclusive access to the drive and acts accordingly.
  From Zoredache