Hello everyone. My family runs a small home network (4 computers). We are quite experienced users, I think *smiles*. My computer has a USB External Hard Drive and I would like to be able to share the contents with the rest of the computers. A regular sharing setup doesn't work, access to the device is denied.... At one point my Dad talked about setting up a directory, shared on my permanent hard drive, and having it point to my USB drive, but we wern't able to find any more information on how to. So now my Dad and I are both quite stumped and would really appreciate any help (and/or walkthroughs ;)... Thanks so much in advance! ~C

Hi, Try going to My Computer and right mouse clicking on the drive in question. In the drop down box click on Sharing and Security. In the next window click on the Sharing tab. In the Sharing tab window make sure that the box next to Make This Folder Private is unchecked. Then below that check the appropriate boxes for sharing and allowing others to make changes to files and folders. Hope that helps and post back to let us know. Good Luck!

Hello. Thanks for the suggestion, but unfortunately I dont have that check box available. I'm logged in as the administrator of the account on both systems. When I attempt to access the drive I get the error message stating that I might not have permissions (all permissions are set to allow) and then it says there's not enough server storage space available. What on earth is it talking about? *LOL* :) Server storage? Thanks again, C

Hi Christina, I must say that I love your sense of humor. Always better to laugh than to get frustrated! I will follow this thread if you keep posting back. Are you running XP Pro? The reason I ask is because we also have a 4 PC home network and 2 of the PCs have external drives which are shared. Until recently we had XP Home installed on 3 of these machines. However, one machine we just upgraded to XP Pro and I am still on a learning curve with it.

Yup. XP Pro. At the time Dad got it, XP Home was still up in the air (no one was sure if it was good enough to run or not). I have to admit though I'm quite impressed with XP Pro.....I haven't rebooted my laptop in a month and my desktop is more stable than its ever been! Sometimes I get so frustrated with this beast of a computer that its laugh or cry...and I dont think my keyboard is spillproof, so laugh it is... *grinz* =o) Have a wonderful day, C