External Hard drive sharing over network

I have an external hard drive that I usually connect to my comp, my bro and I both share this hard drive, however recently we encountered a problem with the sharing capabilities. We are connected through lan behind a router, none of our firewall is on, we both have set it correctly to share but I can’t seem to make it share to my bro. The weird thing is, when he connects it to his comp, I can access it, but when its hooked up to mine comp, he can’t access it. He can see it under “my network places” but can’t seem to get in. I set it up correctly by giving him permission like I always done in the past (and it worked then) but now it doesn’t. Is it because he is running on Vista and I’m on XP? Or is there a particular port I have to open on my router…etc.

 

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...1D-EE46-481E-BA11-37F485FA34EA&displaylang=en

Install the Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD) responder on the XP rig. It is required for proper communication between the 2 computers. I had the same problem myself with my Vista lappy and my 2 XP machines. I also had to disconnect and reset all my routers as well when I was done. Here is the thread about my issues and how I resolved it.

Good luck.

 

thanks for the response, but sadly it didn't work. My bro's vista laptop still can't access the external hard drive that's connected to my XP laptop. I know we are on the same network and we are connected because he can drop/add things into my shared folder, but he can't even access the external hard drive, he sees it but he can't get in. Upon clicking on it, it just says you don't have permission, but i did set up the permission.

 

I'll mess around with mine some tonight. I have 3 portable Seagate drives that I just switch from computer to computer when I need to, so I haven't had to access them via LAN, but I'll see if I can figure what's goin on.

Oh yeah, is the drive formatted FAT32?

 

We made the external hard drive NTFS because i remember when it was FAT32, we couldn't drag in single files more than 4 gigs or something. In theory it should work because it worked in the past, but after a lot of hardware/software changes, it just stopped working so we can't exactly pinpoint what is causing this.

 

NTFS or FAT doesnt matter in this case because the windows sharing is file based and block based access.

There are some difficulties with Vista accassing XP home sharing and a little less problems with XP Prof. I couldnt get it to work outside the standard XP shared folder for a long time.

I used network magic to finally get it too work on mine. Seems to work for lots of people.
http://www.download.com/Network-Magic/3000-2085_4-10654617.html?tag=tab_pub

 

I agree...the Format of the hard drive doesn't matter. I know there are ways to get it to work, but don't have any links right now. Network Magic is what my sis uses for her shared hard drives.

 

so is this a result from vista and xp? I'm a little hesitant to install new softwares because it worked in the past with media center edition and xp pro, but vista and media center edition requires these software?

 

it shouldnt require any software but there are problems with permisions. I asked a similar question in another forum and was told that i can either mess around with the permissions... or i could install network magic on my vista desktop and it works. I installed and it worked.

I think to solve it you have to turn off simple filesharing and configer the permissions in detail somehow.

 

i didn't check simple firesharing because it takes a long time to share my 500 gig external hard drive, but i did test it and tried to share it, still no luck. So i guess the network magic is my last resort? Ill test it at the end of this week.