Hiding the fact that drives are USB?

[tommo123]

I use carbonite(.com) for online backup reasons but it wont use usb/firewire drives.

Is there a way to make the drives appear to be normal IDE/SATA/SCSI drives to force carbonite to accept the drives?

i tend to keep backups on seperate drives just in case. it would be so much easier and tidier to simply backup that drive

 

[tommo123]

anyone?

 

[bendixG15]

ask carbonite

 

[tommo123]

have done, along with other queries. no reply.

so, anyone know how to make usb drives look like normal ata/sata ones?

 

[Nothinman]

Change services, there is absolutely no reason that they should be differentiating between drive types and there's no way to present your drive another way without some major driver work.

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

no good help here, just thoughts.

This is a tough one...There might be a reg hack that could do this...But I'm not familiar with it. I also seem to recall in the Disk manager that you can mount a new volume inside of another volume...but I'm not sure that you can do this with your USB drive...never tried it.

 

[Nothinman]

This is a tough one...There might be a reg hack that could do this...But I'm not familiar with it. I also seem to recall in the Disk manager that you can mount a new volume inside of another volume...but I'm not sure that you can do this with your USB drive...never tried it.

It might be possible to mount the USB volume under another as long as they're both NTFS, but I would switch hosts just out of principle since they obviously have no clue and who knows what other idiotic crap they're doing.

 

[tommo123]

thanks for the idea Cr0nJ0b. will try that and see what comes of it. i have been thinking like nothinman though - really not impressed with carbonite. my sub with them covers me till dec but plan to start looking around sooner. if these people cant even give me a reply to an email i sent in december (diff issue), then i cant rely on them to be reliable in case my data needs recovering.

ta guys.

p.s, let this thread serve as an purpose of showing what carbonite are like

 

[tommo123]

ok, my first email to carbonite was in december and i hadnt had a reply at all.

all of a sudden, after this thread went in the direction of "they suck", i get a reply to an email i sent a week or so ago.

curiouser and curiouser!

 

[ShawnD1]

You might be able to set it in the bios whether or not a usb drive is a hard drive or floppy or CD. My motherboard is an Asus P5LD2 and it has settings that allow it to say what something is; I can tell it my ipod is a hard drive then set it to boot from that ipod. When I get a copy of Vista I'm actually going to try that, before I make the jump to putting it on my real hard drives

 

[tommo123]

nice thought! am encoding a video at the mo and that will take at least another 12 hours but will look into that then

the mounting the partition in a different folder on a local drive thing doesnt work btw.

 

[Nothinman]

You might be able to set it in the bios whether or not a usb drive is a hard drive or floppy or CD. My motherboard is an Asus P5LD2 and it has settings that allow it to say what something is; I can tell it my ipod is a hard drive then set it to boot from that ipod. When I get a copy of Vista I'm actually going to try that, before I make the jump to putting it on my real hard drives

That's irrelevant, once the OS loads the ehci and usb-storage drivers it'll still look like a USB drive to the OS. I suppose you could use the BIOS support if you could disable the usb-storage driver and wrote your own driver to access the drive via BIOS calls but that would be slow as hell.

And Vista won't let you install it to a USB drive, I've tried that already.

 

[nova2]

if you haven't tried NTFS Link and junctions, well, try that.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ntfs+link+elsdoerfer&btnG=Search