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Thread: make a pc into a USB drive

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    make a pc into a USB drive

    Is there a way to turn a pc into a usb storage device? This exists for my WM6 phone, and I'd like to do it for my PC. I can think of two scenarios that it would be useful in:

    - connecting a laptop with a video file on its disk to the USB port on a DVD player
    - quickly transferring files between laptop and desktop without the fuss of setting up networking.

    I hope this exists, but I can't find much on the web. There are USB bridge cables, but I want to be able to do it without having to always have that special cable with me.

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    Re: make a pc into a USB drive

    I don't see how you can avoid having a special cable. Presumably the DVD player is a USB master device (not a slave) and will have a USB A socket, just like the laptop. Standard USB cables are from A to B (or mini/micro B), so cannot be used to connect A to A. In fact, connecting two USB master devices directly together could short out their power supplies and cause damage. Even if you could get an A to A cable that would work, it would be a "special cable".

    The bridge cable seems to offer what you want, and I can't see any way to do it without using special cables. Unless you install a USB slave port on your laptop (if such things exist)...

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    Re: make a pc into a USB drive

    The problem is USB is master/slave, the usb ports on a computer motherboard are not intended to be used as slave devices. So to do this you need special hardware/drivers. Firewire however is completely different, firewire is peer to peer. One of the ways to fix a broken mac is to plug it into a working one at turn it on!

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    Seething Cauldron of Hatred TheAnimus's Avatar
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    Re: make a pc into a USB drive

    As been said above, the answer is no you would need some kind of bridge device.

    Mobile phones and the like are just slave, thou there was some talk about USB on the go or something named like that which would allow a Master and Slave in the same chip, depending on the use, I never saw any sign of it emerge!
    throw new ArgumentException (String, String, Exception)

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    Re: make a pc into a USB drive

    Yes, I realised I was talking crap about the cable after posting. Sounds like a no-hoper anyway if that's correct about the USB host/slave hardware.

    I do recall USB OTG being mooted, shame it doesn't seem to have materialised, I saw it as a way of adding terabyte storage to my phone!

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