Windows 7: Share C drive from Seven to XP

Hello

I' have 2 XP Pro machine and a new Seven machine all are connected on my WORKGROUP network

From Seven I can see (and use the content ) of all the drive shared on my Two XP machine
I've shared my Seven C drive
I can see the Seven Machine and the drive name from my XP machine but access is denied when I try to open it
I can see an unusefull "User" folder pn the Seven machine
Windows networking seems to go bad to worse
Any way any help is welcome

Hi olibara,

Please compare your Windows 7 Files and sharing setup from this tutorial.

Make sure that you have an Identical UserName and Passwords on all the computers in your network.

Verify that Netbios is enabled from the Windows 7 computer.

Disable any Firewalls/Security Software for now.

From another computer in your network, try to access the Win 7 machine this way:
Click on Start=> type \\Win7IPAddress\C or \\Win7IPAddress\C$ press enter after

If you're going to share the c: drive, you might as well open it to anyone on the LAN.
To to that you'll need to add the 'everyone' group with "full control".

Access to the C drive is denied by default for a very good reason. There is absolutely NO need to open up your C drive. 90% of the stuff on the root OS drive is useless to anyone not logged in to your PC. On top of this it is a major security risk. Most of the folders are useless to anyone sharing them, but it is a nice easy way to get malware onto your machine.

If you have user folders on the C drive that you need to share then do them individually, here is a tutorial: File Sharing - Between XP and W7 (and vice versa)

Here's a screenshot of my C drive, which illustrates my point. Out of 10 files/folders on my C drive, only ONE is actually worth sharing. I suspect your's looks similar.

The reason you are being denied access is because the stuff on the C drive is "owned" by System and not your user account. The "unuseful Users folder" as you put it, has the stuff you want to share on it.

Although my question isnt about sharing, I think its related. Somehow my brother's Windows 7 on his laptop got corrupted and it would get stuck at boot. He has all his data in the C: drive and so he wants to backup before trying to fix. I told him to get an USB to SATA to copy the files using his work laptop which has Windows XP. Two drives are detected on XP(C:, and another small partition from Dell I think), the problem is he cant access the C: drive from XP. Since Windows 7 is not working, it shouldn't be possible to change the permissions. Is there a workaround for this? Thanks in advance.
Also, is it possible to access Windows 7 drive using Linux?