Fusing card readers with ssd

Is it possible in WinXP to fuse the card readers, at least the left one, with the SSD drive? I have a 16G transcend in the expansion slot and I need to install visual studio, which unfortunately is not possible to be installed on removable media.
Thanks

 

I had the same problem and found a little workaround. I use TrueCrypt to encrypt the boot HDD of my AAO for security reasons. While at it I found that an ecrypted partition can be mounted as a removable or fixed disk. That was the solution. I encrypted the SSD (good anyway if it is stolen) and mounted the partition via TrueCrypt as a fixed disk. If your boot HDD is encrypted you can add the call for mounting the SSD (inkl. the Password - the Registry is encrypted because it's on the boot HDD) to the Autorun key and everything is ready as soon as you log on.

I hope this helps.

 

Is it possible to expand on the method of doing this?

I can't figure out how to get the SSD and the SD Card to 'merge' as one drive using TrueCrypt.

I've encrypted the system/boot drive using the third option in the wizard (the full 8Gb SSD) and encrypted the 16Gb SD card as a non-system partition, second option in the wizard.

I'm fiddling blindly trying to see if I can get it to work but I'm not having much luck.

Can anyone gives a step-by-step guide as to how to do this?

Thanks for any help

 

Hello cptwhite_uk,

it's not possible to merge the two volumes unsing TrueCrypt. You'll always have to drives. As long as the SD-Card drive is a removable Disk you can't merge it with the disk management. If you can get the card reader to show up as a fixed disk you might join the two disks as a spanned volume (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/libr ... 76741.aspx).

But I can't tell you how to get the card reader to show up as a fixed disk. There might be a howto somewhere else in this forum.

This is just an untested solution. Only to point you in the right direction.

 

The SD card would most likely need to be reprogrammed with the 'fixed disk' bit set. That's if they work in a similar way to USB thumbdrives. You may be able to find some manufacturing tools on the net that can reprogram your card, but I wouldnt hold your breath.

NTFS does support junction points though, use the disk management plugin to remove the drive letter assigned to the SD card and mount it to a folder instead. That would emulate the way linux does it, which is to mount the SD card at /home and move the current /home content onto it.

The capacity of the two stores is never actually merged, the linpus method is deceptive at best, useless at worst.