virtualbox.org

I am running Lunbuntu on an old Pentium IV tower. 2gb ram, 250hd, nearly maxed. I want to use my 6tb Seagate Hub external drive to expand. As far as the host is concerned the Lubuntu has no problem recognizing the hub drive. The VB has been configured to run the USB 2.0 along with the Device settings on the Win XP. Guest additions and extensions are up to date. XP guest recognizes drive, host unmounts automatically. XP device manager recognizes device as being connected. Set to Location = 0. But....I can't find it in the File Manager / Drives of the Computer. C drive is there, of course but no direct access to the external drive. Is it possible the external drive is just too large for XP to recognize it? Any thoughts, advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

BG

Whether the XP installation can read an external drive or not would depend on the formatting of the drive. if the drive is formatted to work natively with Linux, XP will see it as an unformatted drive.

XP only natively understands FAT or NTFS formatted drives and for large capacity drives the format would need to be NTFS (which Linux won't understand without additional software). Microsoft did release a 'patch' for XP that allowed it to read/format exFAT Drives, which also allowed large capacity drives to be used, but that patch was removed from Microsoft's downloads along with all other XP updates when they dropped XP support.

erdeslawe wrote:Microsoft did release a 'patch' for XP that allowed it to read/format exFAT Drives, which also allowed large capacity drives to be used, but that patch was removed from Microsoft's downloads along with all other XP updates when they dropped XP support.

Really??? Seriously now??? Bad, bad, bad Microsoft! Man, things like that drive me crazy. OK, you want to EOL the whole thing? Fine. Don't just pull every file available out there! You simply stop supporting XP, don't just make them disappear!

Anyway, for anyone interested, the actual filename is "WindowsXP-KB955704-x86-ENU.exe" (the English version). I'm sure that the search engines will have something to offer...

Thankfully I have a copy on each and every of my USB sticks, but I can't legally post it here. However, I could checksum it if anyone is interested.

I'm not sure why exFAT is being discussed? If your Linux has difficulty reading NTFS volumes then I'm not sure why exFAT would be any better.

NTFS itself can handle volumes up to 2^64 clusters, so it can easily cope with a 6TB drive. However the same can't be said for any drive partitioning scheme understood by XP, i.e. MBR. The largest size drive that MBR partitioning can handle is 2TB, unless you want to get into non standard sector sizes, which I wouldn't recommend.

Personally, I'd just map the drive as a shared folder and let the host OS worry about the underlying technology.