Windows 7: LAN File Sharing "7" to "XP" Permissions issue

Hello Everyone

I'm really hoping there is someone here who can help me with what should be an easy issue. This might be something related to workgroup vs home group but I think I have that understood.

I have a windows 7 machine with the same workgroup set as my two XP machines. I then went in and set four harddrives root directories to share. Now what is weird and very frustrating is that two of the hard drives the other computers can get into just like one would expect. However the other two drives are behaving completely different. One drive it just gives a permissions error message right away. The other it lets me access one layer of folders but then gives the same message when I try to open any one of them.

It's very frustrating, I set up the sharing just with simple right click- the drive say share and "Everyone" read/write/full, so I don't understand how some can be interacting differently than others.

Any help would be great.

Thanks in advance

Gary

No solution is immediately apparent to me, but am I correctly assuming were dealing with all NTFS drives here?
And are the four hard drives on the XP machine?
Did you name each share for each drive? Try mapping the shared drive(s) that you now can not with their drive letter followed by $.

For example...

//192.168.1.20/d$

...and see what happens.

Also, make sure each machine being shared from has a password set. You can not share with a blank (non-existant) pass.

Thanks for your reply

First yes all drives are NTFS.

No the four drives are all coming from the Windows 7 machine. There is a video drive, a music drive, a picture drive and lastly a file drive. It serves these to the network of three.

I tried giving the drives a name as well as endeding in "$" but it would not take it.

The thing that I find so odd is how two of the drives I can get into no problem but the other two are unopenable.

There have been issues sharing anything located on the windows drive of win 7 with XP on older builds, what build are you on?.

Hi

I'm running the RC build 7100

I hadn't heard about sharign issues with the windows "C:" drive. But it's not a concern here, I'm sharing or trying to share my D:, I:, J: and K: drives.

No problems here sharing on build 7100, password on account, default read only on shares. Check you shares and permissions in computer management and if all looks good remove the share and try again.

I had issues sharing drives a few years back when I changed my system over to Vista, perhaps its the same issue.

If you are a peer to peer network as most small networks are and you wish to share I had to create an account for each user that wanted to access shares on each machine, that's the only way I could get it to work right.


Example:

1. Machine 1 has a user named Dude, and the Docs folder is shared with everyone.
2. Machine 2 has a user named Dudette, and her Docs folder is shared with everyone.

On Machine 1 create an additional user called Dudette, and on Machine 2 create an additional user called Dude. That's what I had to to between Vista and XP machines to get my workgroup shares to function properly.

Hopefully, Windows 7's Homegroup will solve all these issues... but I havent had a chance to try!

Wow, I came across this thread and had to register for this forum. The problem is the OP is exactly my problem. Win 7 64 Ultimate machine, sharing D, E and K drives out to two XP machines on my LAN. My D and E drives are hard drives in the Win 7 machine. The K drive is an external USB drive hooked up to the Win 7 machine.

I shared all three using the same method.

The K drive works perfectly. I can access the K drive and all subfolders and I have full access like I want. Btw, I didn't have the share subfolders separately. They just got shared as the K drive was shared.

The E drive let's me get at the first layer. I can see all these subfolders and a few files. I can access the files. But I cannot get into any of the subfolders (access denied).

The D drive won't let me access even the root D drive.

It's all the same from both XP computers.

You will sometimes need to go into the Security settings of the drive in order to share it's contents. This needs to be done in addition to the regular permissions.

To share the entire drive:
Open My Computer -> right click Local Disk D or which ever drive letter your drive is using -> select Properties -> select Security tab -> click Edit button -> click Add button -> enter the name of the User you want to set Security permissions (it is the same user name you've set the sharing permissions for, ex. Everyone will set the read permissions to every user. Put check marks in the boxes for full access and control -> click OK hit apply-> select the desired permissions -> click OK -> wait while permissions are set -> and your Done.

Thanks Chev. I'm so excited to go home and try our security settings. It sounds so...plausible!!