Windows 7 - Strange Network Shares Problem

3 computers... 1 with Windows 7, 2 others with Vista. On my main Vista machine I have drives F, G, I and K shared. I can see and connect to each share on my Vista laptop. But the Windows 7 machine can access the main Vista computer, display all the shares. But I can only access the shares for Public and K share. F, G and I shares give me the message "Windows cannot access \\computer\f ", you do not have permission to access.... " etc. I have double and triple checked the settings for the shares on the Vista machine and I have full control on all shares set in permissions.

I've read as many threads as possible, but they all either do connect or don't. I'm in between as the Windows 7 machine will connect to some shares, but not all.

Any ideas of where to start?

Hello dnelms, and welcome to the Seven Forums

One thing to check is security permissions on those drives in addition to the sharing permissions, you may need to give "everyone" at least read permissions on the inaccessible drives or if that is not appropriate, explicit permissions to the users you wish to have access to the contents

hope this helps

Thanks, but after double checking the security tab and settings on each one, all are still inaccessible.

EDIT: Just noticed something. 3 of the 4 drives are all NTFS file system, while the K drive (the accessible one) uses the FAT32 file system. It is a USB drive that I must have failed to format to NTFS when I plugged it in. Could that have any bearing on anything?

Whether a file/folder being shared is FAT32 or NTFS has no bearing on Windows file sharing unless the OS accessing the NTFS file/folder resource is not capable of reading NTFS file systems like pre-NTFS windows OSes.

I've encoutered you're issue before but unfortunately couldn't find the resource links. Will get back to you asap once I've located it

Interesting, the main difference in sharing these two file systems is permissions.

NTFS has individual File/folder permissions in addition to the share permissions all of which have to be set to allow sharing.

FAT32 relies only on the share permissions

As you have checked these File/folder permissions I must assume that it is something else.

It has me confused I'm afraid