2 Ways of Making Your SDHC A Resident Hard Drive in XP

rljaplit of EeePH forum has posted an excellent tutorial on turning your SDHC memory card into a "permanent" drive. He describes two methods - the first by mounting your SD/SDHC card and the second by using MicroDrive drivers.

The first, mounting your SD/SDHC Card, is recommended if you only have one SD/SDHC card reader and regularly swap out cards -

A simple solution is to mount the SD/SDHC card as a directory in C: which is a local disk. This tricks programs into thinking they are being installed to a directory on the C drive, and also allows you to swap cards on the fly without any issues. And because you are not making any driver modifications, you get to keep your high read/write performance. It's also much simpler and can be easily unmounted.

1. Create a Program Files directory on your SD/SDHC card (E.g.: E:\Program Files\)
2. Create a SDHC directory in your C:\Program Files\ directory. (E.g: C:\Program Files\SDHC\)
3. Right click on My Computer and click Manage.
4. Select the Disk Management plugin under Storage on the left.
5. Right click on your SD/SDHC drive and click Change Drive Letter and Paths….
6. Click Add…
7. Make sure “Mount in the following empty NTFS folder” is selected, and browse for the directory you created in step 2.
8. Click OK to the three windows open and close Computer Management.

The second method is to use MicroDrive drivers and is recommended if you have a second card reader modification/hack or only own one memory card.

This fix will trick Windows and program installers into thinking your SD/SDHC card is a fixed local disk. While this has the obvious benefit of allowing stubborn installers to install to your SD/SDHC card just like the Mount method, it also carries the unfortunate side effects of decreased read/write performance, as well as hampering the card reader's plug and play and hot-swappability (after you install this driver, once you swap out your card, Windows will not quickly recognize the new card).

1. Download the MicroDrive drivers here and extract them to a folder on the desktop.
2. Insert your SD/SDHC card into your EeePC.
3. Click Start > Run > type “regedit” (without quotes) and click OK.
4. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\USBSTOR\Disk&Ven_USB2.0&Prod_CardReader_SD0&Rev_0100/.
5. Inside that you should find another directory that is just a bunch of numbers. Mine reads: 146030377350&0. Select it to display its contents in the right pane.
6. In the right pane you should see a key called “HardwareID”. Double-click on it.
7. You should see 7 lines of text. Copy ONLY the first line to the clipboard. Mine reads: USBSTOR\DiskUSB2.0__CardReader_SD0__0100
8. Click Cancel, and close Registry Editor.
9. Open cfadisk.inf in the directory you unzipped the MicroDrive driver to.
10. Delete all lines between [cfadisk_device] and [cfadisk_addreg].
11. Below [cfadisk_device], insert a new line, and type the following: %Microdrive_devdesc% = cfadisk_install,
12. After the comma, hit CTRL V to paste what you copied from the registry into the file.
13. Save the file.
14. Right click My Computer and click Manage.
15. On the left pane, click the Device Manager plugin.
16. Under disk drives, you should see SiliconMotion and USB2.0 Card Reader. Right click on the card reader and click update driver.
17. Direct the driver updater window to the Hitachi driver you just edited. It won’t detect the driver automatically, you have to specify that you're supplying the disk for the hardware and force it to use the driver.
18. After the driver is updated, restart Windows.

You can read the complete thread, including comments and additional suggestions, here.