Jornada picked up as an external HD?

Hey, I have a 5gb pcmcia harddrive for my jornada 720. Is there any other way to have a computer access the jornada or more importantly the PCMCIA hd as an external drive (ie not installing any sort of sync software.Just wondering cause the computers in university have a great internet connection but you can't install any softwae on them. Lil USB flash drives are picked up as another drive, can i achieve this?

.....IB a n e

Bane,
I don't think it is possible. First, serial won't work for a lot of reasons I think you can figure out. The USB connection needs to be designed for such functions in hardware; you cannot change it thru software.

The only PDA so far that can do that is the palmOne Tungsten T5, which can be switched between being a Palm or a drive, but not both at the same time (not possible).

One possible solution to your problem is to use BT on both machines. But since I have never used BT myself, I don't know if it'll work.

I don't know if there's any USB adapter for PCMCIA storage either. It would be unpopular I guess. However it is possible to use a USB CF plus a PCMCIA CF converter, but that's kinda Frankenstein; again don't know if it'll work.

Hope that helps.

I would suggest a Kingston FCR-HS2/ATA USB 2.0 PCMCIA card reader (http://www.kingston.com/digitalmedia/pccard.asp). Cost is about US$30.

Assuming your university has XP installed (or probably 2000), the reader is plug-and-play. So, you could use the PC card in your Jornada and then swap it to the Kingston when you wanted to use a university machine. I used have a 2GB card that I swapped between my MobilePro 890 and my office desktop, but I have largely moved to CF and SD storage now.

I hope this helps.

Bruce
MP890 Evangelist

Yeah man it did thanx. I think that is what I am looking for. It would make things easier, even at my home pc for transferring music, or even films that I have encoded to watch on my jornada. a 300 MB movie takes about 3 hours or a little less to transfer, it would be done within a minute or so with the Pc card reader via usb I would think...now to search through Ebay!

........Ib a n e

Try a Sharp Zaurus SL-C860 (no longer made), SL-C1000 or SL-C3000(comes with built in 4GB microdrive) user website. Beginning with the Zaurus 860 handheld, Zaurus devices and their Cards are seen by Windows, Linux and Mac PCs as external hard drives. This is done through software (Linux), not hardware so some users here may be able to tell you how to port and use the Linux utility that does the job for Zaurus.

There are members here who use some Linux drivers and utilities loaded onto cards with their Jornadas.

--Bruised

Antec used to make a USB PCMCIA Card reader called 'PhotoChute' (there were at least two versions). I don't think they make them any more but you should be able to find one on eBay.