Setting up a network drive on a home network

Question

I've setup a home network using Netgear N300 wireless router (using Windows 7).

I'm trying to get one of my hard drives to be available on the network, so I went to the "sharing" tab of the HD's properties setting and allowed sharing on the HD and turned off password protection so that you don't need a password to access the HD. I also set the permissions to give full control, change, and read access to the "Everyone" group.

From another computer in the network, I tried connecting to the network HD but ultimately got "Access denied" despite the fact that I gave full control to "Everyone".

How do I get the computer to be able to connect to the shared HD?

Answer 1

How did you connect to it?

Assuming all Windows 7 systems here, given what you did above, you should be able to press the Windows key + R and enter the following in the Run dialog that pops up:

\\computername\driveletter$

where computername is the name of the computer (look in Control Panel -> System to find that out) and subtitute the drive letter you shared for driveletter, e.g. c$. If computername doesn't work, try substituting the IP address of the system, e.g. \\192.168.2.15\driverletter$ or similar. What should pop up is an Explorer window displaying the contents of that drive.

Windows 7 has a "Homegroup" feature that you may want to look into if all systems are Windows Vista or higher systems. Control Panel -> Network and Sharing Center -> Choose homegroup and sharing options.

EDIT: I found this which suggests to try the following. You might actually already be in a Homegroup (you may have enabled it during setup), which looks like it disables direct access to network drives (personally I've yet to try out the Homegroup feature). Make sure it's turned off by doing the following:

Open the control panel.

Go to Network and Internet.

Go to HomeGroup.

Click on the blue link "Leave the homegroup."

Another thing to try is enabling File and Printer Sharing and changing a registry key:

Open the control panel.

Go to Network and Internet.

Go to Network and Sharing Center.

In the left column, click on Change advanced sharing settings.

There are two profiles. You probably don’t want this on when you’re on a public network so open Home or Work.

Under the header File and Printer sharing, select the "Turn on…" option.

Open the registry editor.

Navigate all the way to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System.

Right-click in the pane on the right side and add a new DWORD (32-bit).

Give the new setting the name LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy, Double click on that setting and give it a value of 1.

You may need to reboot after that.

Answer 2

I don't know whether it's true for Windows after XP, it seems that default shares (drive letters such as C$, D$) are no longer directly shared by default. It's better to share the whole drive manually (will be shared as a folder) if needed. However anonymous with no password access is also restricted, so an account with password protected is needed to get your files through network access.

If you just want to instantly access the network drives through the Command Prompt (press Windows + R, input cmd then press Enter), type the following command:

start \\pcA\folderA

• pcA: the name of the remote PC
• folderA: the name of the shared folder on the remote PC

Alternatively you can use the net use command to map network drives persistently, here is an example:

net use z: \\pcA\folderA /user:peter 123456 /p:yes

• z: drive letter name(A-Z)
• peter: user name on remote PC
• 123456: password for peter
• /p:yes: persistent, (accessible after reboot)

Before I committed, I found the following on a wiki about administrative shares(default shares):

By default, Windows Vista and newer versions of Windows prevent local accounts from accessing administrative shares through the network.

To enable administrative shares you have to make a registry change. Click on Start Menu and in the search box type ‘regedit’ and press ENTER. Add this registry item:

Hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Key: Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
Name: LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy
Data Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 1