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I would like to mount a hard drive on a remote computer (running on CentOS 6) as a Windows drive so that I can install programs to that drive. The primary hard drive for my Windows machine (which is at home) is pretty small, I have a Linux server sitting in a remote data center with a much larger hard drive and allow me to install more stuff.

I know most of you are going to say Samba, unfortunately the biggest problem for me in this case is that I can not mount Samba as a network share unless I start OpenVPN or SSH tunneling first, which is not good for my case because I will install some startup programs to the remote drive as well. Therefore, the remote drive has to be ready and work just like another drive BEFORE any of the startup programs start to load.

Is that possible? My home PC has Windows 7 Professional 32 bit installed and the remote server is a Xen virtual server running on CentOS 6. I have admin/root permissions for both.

Thanks a lot!

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    Save yourself some head pain and just go buy another disk.
    – squillman
    Sep 22, 2011 at 16:07
  • Why do you need that? You probably will not boot Windows over a VPN tunnel.
    – mailq
    Sep 22, 2011 at 16:08
  • I used the term "home PC" to simplify my description, but it is actually a remote desktop virtual PC that is sitting in another data centre, and adding hard drives to it will cost quite a bit...
    – zhuanyi
    Sep 22, 2011 at 17:53
  • Internet bandwidth is much lower than the 4K hdmi display cord. Did you know why almost all Linux servers don't have desktop, only command line? It is because this. If you have to run some background applications on cloud, make sure to set low resolution and try VNC to show its desktop.
    – George Y
    Jun 25, 2022 at 5:06

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The only other thing I can think of besides Samba is to use the SSHD FTP subsystem to do a SSH tunnel via FTP and mounting that as a drive on Windows 7. I know Windows 7 supports mounting a FTP server as a drive, but the performance of it is terrible in my experience , and I haven't tried to mount a SFTP device before. Presumably, its possible though.

Or perhaps you can run a regular FTP server on the Centos machine and then create a tunnel using a Putty proxy running in the background on your windows system, and THEN mount it as a regular FTP drive.

Still, all of these things are harder than using Samba I think. (NOTE: http://thegreenoak.blogspot.com/2012/03/publicly-share-user-home-folder-in.html).

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