Passworded AND unpassworded shares on same machine

I have a Win7 machine I would like to set up with some shares for Everyone, and others only for users registered on the machine. I'm on a Workgroup.

So I disabled the Sharing global password requirement, but set registered user Security parameters for the folders I want to have restricted access.

The wide-open folders work fine, but the problem is that when trying to access the restricted folders from another network machine, access is denied and no password prompt is afforded. If I got the password prompt I could log in, while others couldn't, and that would be perfect.

I suppose this is standard Windows behavior by design. That seems to leave me with the option of reenabling global sharing passwords and then creating another user whose credentials I would give out for access to the unrestricted folders.

Or is there a way to do this without global passwords?

Thanks!

paul1149 said:

I have a Win7 machine I would like to set up with some shares for Everyone, and others only for users registered on the machine. I'm on a Workgroup.

So I disabled the Sharing global password requirement, but set registered user Security parameters for the folders I want to have restricted access.

The wide-open folders work fine, but the problem is that when trying to access the restricted folders from another network machine, access is denied and no password prompt is afforded. If I got the password prompt I could log in, while others couldn't, and that would be perfect.

I suppose this is standard Windows behavior by design. That seems to leave me with the option of reenabling global sharing passwords and then creating another user whose credentials I would give out for access to the unrestricted folders.

Or is there a way to do this without global passwords?

Thanks!

Password protected sharing doesn't really work the way you would think. It isn't really a supported option at all.

The best and easiest way to set up restricted shares is set up a Homegroup but only allow users or machines to join the Homegroup that require complete access to all shared Library's on all Homegroup or Workgroup machines.

Leave the users who require restricted access out of the Homegroup and if you need to share a particular Library with them then just add the "Everyone" share to the list of users via the Homegroup style sharing options.

In this case the "Everyone" share refers to machines or users who are not joined to the local Homegroup but are included in the local Workgroup.

Thanks, Chev. I appreciate your input. Homegroups are not a terribly good solution for me, as there can be all kinds of machines on this LAN, and I believe Homegroups are supported only by Win7 on. I don't get why Win7 doesn't prompt for the password rather than summarily barring access, as that would solve everything very neatly.

Thanks again,
Paul