Cannot Access Shared Drive From An PC On Home Network

I have three computers in my home, my primary desktop PC, a second desktop PC, and a laptop PC connected to my TV downstairs via a HDMI cable. All computers are running Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1. The primary computer is using an Ethernet connection to the internet. The other two computers connect via Wi-Fi.

My primary computer has a six TB Western Digital External USB hard drive connected to it via USB 3.0 port on the computer. I have marked the drive as Shared. This drive is a Media Drive which contains all my music, audiobooks, videos, and such. My intention is to make the drive accessible to all computers in the house so that everyone can access the media.

Initially mounting the shared drive worked without any issues. I was able to access the drive's connect from two different PC's with no issues. The next day when I booted the laptop it would not connect to the shared drive. I dismounted the drive and tried to reconnect without success. I received an error message stating that Curtis-Home-PC could not be accessed and I did not have permission to access the drive contact system admin. I have tried several different things to correct the problem without success.

Any help you can provide is much appreciated.

Can you ping the PC are the drives still showing shared and do they have the same drive letter?

Which PC are you referring to, the laptop? Is the drive showing as shared from where? I can't access it from anywhere but my primary desktop and yes it is marked as shared. The drive letter on the primary PC is M. I never get that far when trying to mount the drive on the laptop because my first instinct is to see if the laptop is going to "see" the drive, so your question is moot. As an added bit of information, I have tried mounting the drive from the primary PC and it can "see" the share. I know it's pointless to mount the drive since it's already connected via USB, I just wanted to test the share to see if it was visible.

try running NetBScanner - NetBIOS scanner it shows all your pc and wakes up their view of each other try connecting via a cmd prompt by typing
net use s: \\tower\movies /user:HTG Pa$$word replace htg with username on the pc thats sharing and pa$$word with that users password

I have run NetBScanner from both the primary desktop and the laptop. Both computers can "see" each other. In other words two IPs listed. Not sure what this proves or how it solves the problem. Additionally, the primary computer can "see" the shares available on the laptop. I have Homegroup enabled and can access the user folders of the laptop from the primary desktop. Successfully mounted one of the folders from the laptop to my primary desktop so that I could copy the NetBScanner utility to the laptop. Primary desktop is upstairs. Laptop is downstairs.

My issue has been solved with a little extra digging. Firstly, I was unaware that creating a share uses authentication by default. In other words user name and password must be entered. I found this out when I tried to mount the shared drive from one of the other PCs in my home. It asked for a user name and password where my laptop did not, it only produced the error message. I have no user name or password set up on any of my machines so I had to disable this option. To disable this I had to log onto my PC using the Windows Admin account and turn off the option in Network Sharing. Secondly, I had to access the share's security settings and create a new Group/Role called Everyone and assign access rights to that group. Once those two steps were accomplished I was able to successfully mount the shared drive.

Nigel, Thanks for the concern but I'm good. Every choice has risks. I'm not a newbie. I'm a software engineer and have 3 degrees in the field. Besides, there were never any passwords on any of my systems to start with. This was the only way to solve the problem.