(10g) Possible to create tablespace on USB hard drive?

Question

I've been trying unsuccessfully to get something to work, without success so far. After the hurricanes of recent years we realized that with widespread power outages and network problems, being able to put our database on standalone laptops would be very useful for our field people. The full database is too large, but if I exclude the stored documents, it becomes manageable. Unfortunately, my management wants to have the option of including some documents. My thought was to create a separate tablespace to hold just that table, and put the tablespace on a USB hard drive, so if the field scientist didn't want the documents, they could just leave the external hard drive in the office. But I can't create the tablespace to test this out - I keep getting an ORA-27044 "unable to write header block" followed by "There is not enough space on the disk". I'm trying to create a 10GB tablespace, the external drive has 300GB free. Am I running into a Windows/USB restriction?
(I know there would be a problem with not having the tablespace available if the field guy didn't take the USB drive, but I'm trying to get past this problem first)
Thanks,
Harry

Answer 1

I currently have a 4GB pendrive but not a USB external hard disk.
I have been able to create a tablespace on this pen drive (I ensured that the pen drive always mounts with a particular drive letter only). I am using Oracle 11.1.0.6.0 on Windows XP Professional 32 bit SP2.
In following example, J: drive is my pen drive.
SQL> create tablespace test datafile 'j:\data01.dat' size 1M;
Tablespace created.
SQL> select * from v$tablespace;
       TS# NAME                           INC BIG FLA ENC
         0 SYSTEM                         YES NO  YES
         1 SYSAUX                         YES NO  YES
         2 UNDOTBS1                       YES NO  YES
         4 USERS                          YES NO  YES
         3 TEMP                           NO  NO  YES
         6 EXAMPLE                        YES NO  YES
         7 TEST                           YES NO  YES
7 rows selected.
SQL> create table testtable (id number) tablespace test;
Table created.
SQL> insert into testtable select object_id from user_objects;
29730 rows created.
SQL> commit;
Commit complete.
SQL> drop tablespace test including contents and datafiles;
Tablespace dropped.
SQL> select * from v$tablespace;
       TS# NAME                           INC BIG FLA ENC
         0 SYSTEM                         YES NO  YES
         1 SYSAUX                         YES NO  YES
         2 UNDOTBS1                       YES NO  YES
         4 USERS                          YES NO  YES
         3 TEMP                           NO  NO  YES
         6 EXAMPLE                        YES NO  YES
6 rows selected.