Just wondering if anyone has any thoughts on how I could solve this problem.

I have an External drive attached to my PC (vista) and I can share that drive on my network and it works great, but when you turn the drive off and/or restart the PC, it forgets the sharing, and I get bugged to re-share it everytime someone wants something.

Is there a way I can have a permanent share, pointing at a drive that may not exist most of the time?

I imagine it would work so if the drive is off, and someone trys to connect, it gets an inaccessible or unavailable error, but as soon as i turn it on, it starts working.

Nevermind, I figured it out, usually it helps when you try and explain your problem to someone

So anyway, this is how you do it:

Create an empty directory on a fixed drive, e.g., C:\external

Then, mount the directory to the drive, using the mountvol command.
In the command prompt (run as administrator) , run mountvol. This shows you the volume names of the drives, for example: \\?\Volume{c6666841-35af-11da-bad4-806d6172696f}\

use:
mountvol C:\external \\?\Volume{c6666841-35af-11da-bad4-806d6172696f}\

Now, share C:\external

Works brilliantly