Sharing laptop's internal optical drive running windows XP Media Center Edition with Netbook running windows 7

Question

just got a new HP netbook with no optical drive and guide said I should be able to share the optical drive of another windows computer. The netbook is running Windows 7 and the laptop, also HP, with the internal optical drive is running Windows XP Media Center Edition. I have wireless network that both the laptop and netbook access without a problem. The instructions did not seem to work in my case. When I right clicked on Properties of the optical drive and went to the Sharing tab, there was no selction for Advanced Sharing as the instructions said. XP made me go to Network wizard and set up a network, (which I already had). After doing that I could not access the drive from Windows 7. Has anyone benn able to do this?

Answer 1

You can enable the "Advanced Sharing" (this is a bad name, the tab on the dialog still only says "Sharing) by following Windows XP Networking guide.

To Turn on Advanced File Sharing

1. In Windows Explorer, click Tools, then click Folder Options.
2. On the View tab, in the Advanced Settings area, click to clear the Use Simple File Sharing (Recommended) check box.

...

To Share a Folder Using Advanced File Sharing

1. Right–click the folder you want to share, and then click Sharing and Security. What you'll see is the advanced Sharing tab in Figure 2.
2. Click to select the Share This Folder check box.
3. In the Share Name box, enter the name of the share the way you want it to look on the network. I usually leave the share name the same as the folder name, but you might want to use a more descriptive name.
4. Click Permissions, and then edit the list of users who have access to the share. You can give each user or group full control of the share, permit them to change, or just read files.

Answer 2

What I was looking for is called iSCSI, which stands for Internet-SCSI. SCSI is what computers use to connect peripheral devices like hard disks and optical drives. So iSCSI is like "connecting a hard disk or a CD drive over a network".

It seems to me that there are many solutions to do this, one solution that works for me (and is for free) is Alcohol 52% as iSCSI-target and Microsoft iSCSI Software Initiator as iSCSI-Initator/Client (which is installed by default on Win7). A guide can be found at the Alcohol support page. Remember that Alcohol 120% is not Alcohol 52%, Alcohol 52% can be downloaded for free.

After setup I tested the configuration and noticed that after a restart, the iSCSI-target could not be found. But after a restart of the iSCSI Service which is called "StarWind iSCSI Service" it works again.