My "main" PC is XP Home with a USB connected external drive I use for backups. My second PC is a Win98 laptop and I want to back up this one to the same external drive. So in the main PC I set the external drive for sharing, the laptop can see it and all's well. But each time I reboot the main PC, the sharing properties for the external drive have disappeared and I have to reset them again. How can I make them "sticky"?

johngie

Try setting it up the way you want and then disconnecting the USB device with the tray icon. Unplug the cable, plug it back in, and hope

If that doesn't work: set it up the way you want again, right-click on 'my computer', click 'manage', and go into 'disk management'. Right click on the drive in question and ensure that it has it's own drive letter assigned. If not, XP will assign the drive letter dynamically each time it activates the device and that could cause the lost settings.

XP is so flaky :/

That behavior is by design in XP. It's assumed that external drives such as those connected by USB are only temporarily connected.

You may also be able to fix this by going into Device Manager, opening the Device Properties pane for that drive, then changing the Policy to "Optimize for performance." Be absolutely sure to change the USB Root Hub's Power Management setting to dis"Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power," otherwise you could lose the contents of the drive's write buffer whenever the system goes into standby power mode.

Edited May 28, 200620 yr by 5eraph