How do i make my USB harddrive universally accessible

I save my itunes music library + the music files on an external USB drive. I recently bought a win 7 machine and i loaded itunes on it and i pointed to the library on the USB harddrive. It worked fine. However when i tried to edit id3 tags or play the music via itunes, it wouldn't let me.
I later on figured that it because of the win 7 permissions issue. So i went ahead and tried to change the permissions of the complete music folder ( which has my music and itunes library). However this messed up something and now certain music files have the required permission on the machine and certain don't. moreover this messed up the permissions even further because when i connected back to my win xp machine, it wouldn't let me get into certain music folders either.

so in short my question is how set permissions for universal access on USB drive such any win 7 machine, or any XP machine can freely read/write (ie. have full control).

Thanks in advance.
Sid

Welcome to the Forums!

The simplest thing - if it is the permissions issue and not some weird iTunes limitation which I saw plenty - is to format the USB drive to FAT32. This file system does not support permissions and therefore all files would be automatically accessible to Everyone with full access. The drawback is that this file system does not allow files larger than 4 GB, but since you are interested in music files, you should not have a problem with this.

Thanks Unifex,
That is actually a no-go for me as max partition size can be only 32gb.. and i need more than that

is there a way i can give full access to everyone -for everything that is there on the USB drive

Well yes, there is a user called "EVERYONE".

So if you add that user to the permissions list and give them full permissions that should probably fix it :)

skhimsara said:

is there a way i can give full access to everyone -for everything that is there on the USB drive

Sure. Open Windows Explorer, pick the drive - suppose it's E:\ for the sake of the argument, but your drive letter might well be different, right-click and choose Properties. In the pop-up window go to the Security tab, click Advanced (at the bottom). Then click "change permissions" -> "add" and add the user Everyone to the list. Then edit the permissions explicitly giving full access. Before closing the Advanced security settings windows check the box "replace all child object permissions ... ". Then apply. This should open your drive and all files on it to Everyone.

Thanks Fseal
will that solve the issue with my older win xp box giving me issues of not being able to access folders...

thanks a ton guys..the "everyone" trick seems to work.
however i am still not sure if that will break anything on the win xp machine....