Help with NAS access

[lawrencehare]

We recently purchased a new PC to replace an ancient slow thing, my wife is a Flash programmer and does extensive html work, photo editing and so on, nearly all data is saved on a Drobo NAS. The Windows 7 machine cannot see the NAS and it is driving us crazy. It came with Windows 7 Home Basic. I thought Windows 7 was Windows 7, but apparently there are a bunch of versions and ours is hobbled for some reason.

The machine is an HP and they have been most helpful, telling us to change the NTLM setting in the policy manager - and we spent half a day trying to do this until HP finally discovered that Windows 7 Home Basic does not have a policy manager. All other solutions have also failed.

The Drobo is an SMB device and everything else on the home network can see it, this includes Windows XP machines and Macs. The Windows 7 machine can ping it just fine and the Norton network discovery thing can see it, identify it and everything else on the network as well. Not the actual Windows 7 OS however.

Our workgroup name is harenet. Windows 7 has a thing called Homegroup and I cannot find any place where one sets the Domain or Workgroup name. And in one of the network windows it shows the Homegroup as named "Harenet 2". I do not know where it got this name from, especially the " 2" bit. But I am wondering if this is my workgroup name with some qualifier, the " 2", or if it has got the name wrong and this is why it cannot see the NAS. Either way, I cannot for the life of me see where the workgroup name is entered so I can see if the " 2" is part of it, and then correct it if I need to. And if the name is correct, why cannot it see the NAS?

Can anyone help with this. How can I verify that the machine has the correct workgroup name and how can I correct it.

Thanks - Lawrence (Shouldn't this be the simplest of tasks and the most basic of necessities?)

 

[jnewton37]

Same problem

Hi,

Saw that you didn't get any responses. Was wondering if you were able to resolve the issue yourself. I'm trying to get Windows 7 Ultimate to recognize my Drobo (gen 2). My XP laptop sees it fine, but Windows 7 refuses, regardless of what I do to the firewall, iSCSI settings, etc.

Thanks
Joel

 

[zzz2496]

Access your Drobo directly using IP address like this --> \\IP_of_your_drobo - example: \\192.168.0.100 (write that in the explorer's address bar)

zzz2496

 

[lawrencehare]

Thanks yes, it was the workgroup thing which I was unable to find in W7. I was led down the wrong path in thinking it was a policy change I needed, I forget which now, but I could not figure out how to access the policy manager, it NEVER occurred to me that it had been removed!!! I am still totally bewildered by the fact I buy a so-called professional workstation with pretty much the best of everything and the OS has been hobbled. I needed to upgrade apparently, a lot of money for a one-time configuration change. It really was the last straw - I spent hours on this!!! So we are moving to OS X and one home machine is now running Ubuntu!

Which is all rather fun!

But for the moment, once I found out where the workgroup had moved to and fixed that, then it all worked. I did use a direct IP address, but for some reason that did not work either. Bottom line is we spent days on this, which was a straightforward configuration entry for the other machines.

Windows 7 is a bit excessive imo, I will continue to use XP on the machines running Windows and on OS X under Parallels and Bootcamp, but I have a hard time with W7.

Thanks for your help,

Best regards,

Lawrence