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    file sharing and disk access between windows 7 and xp

    Discussion in 'Windows OS and Software' started by rouse, Mar 12, 2012.

  1. rouse

    rouse Notebook Geek

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    i'm thinking that this is more of a software issue rather than a hardware networking issue. i have windows 7 home premium on my laptop, but xp on my desktop. i use to be able to access the disks on my xp desktop from my laptop, but recently i decided to install an ssd for booting and programs on my desktop, and so did a clean install of xp on the ssd (which also was something of a challenge). then i did the usual thing of putting shares on all the desktop drives, and turning on network discovery etc on the laptop. at first, my laptop did not even report my desktop on the network. then it randomly did so, but i couldn't reproduce it. after fooling around with settings, including disabling any firewall on the xp and any access restrictions by my antivirus software (mcafee), now the laptop regularly reports the desktop as being on my network, but when i try to access any desktop disk, i get an error (network path not found). i can ping the desktop, so i think the network connection is fine. after struggling a few hours with this, thought i'd get some suggestions. any ideas of things i might have missed.
     
    rouse, Mar 12, 2012
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  2. toronto

    toronto Notebook Deity

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    I went through that a while back, wanting to access WinXP disks across the network from my Win7 machine. It was quite involved getting it to work, as it's fundamentally not trivial to allow network shares from WinXP to Win7, at least not to allow full root access to the disks (which is what I wanted).

    I ended up following some arcane procedures from an MS help site to get the network shares to work for all folders. Sorry, don't recall the exact site or exactly what I did.
     
    toronto, Mar 12, 2012
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  3. Peon

    Peon Notebook Virtuoso

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    How did you set up file sharing?

    There's a dozen ways to do it ranging from Simple File Sharing to the HomeGroup, but the only way that's guaranteed to work involves configuring Access Control Lists. It's extremely complicated to set up as it's intended for enterprise usage, but that also makes it extremely reliable because enterprise IT departments would never upgrade to newer versions of Windows if it broke their file shares.
     
    Peon, Mar 12, 2012
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