Need help with external USB hard drive

[Jim]

Some months ago I installed an external USB hard drive on one of my 3
Windows XP Pro computers. The drive worked well on this local computer and
it could also be accessed from any of my 2 other networked computers.

Last week I tried to access this drive remotely for the first time in about
a month and found that I no longer have permissions. I do have this drive
set up properly as far as I can tell.

Thinking I may have a problem with this particular computer, I moved the
external drive to one of my other 2 computers. Again, the drive works fine
locally but same access problem when I try to use it over the network.

Appreciate any and all suggestions as to what my problem might be. Also, is
there any recommended software program that I could used to diagnose network
problems?

TIA

Jim

 

[LVTravel]

A guess here but if the USB drive was turned off when the local computer was
booted you may have lost the Sharing ability. Check by going to the local
computer, Open the drive with Windows Explorer and right click on the drive
letter. Check if it is still shared.

 

[Guest]

Checked to make sure you enabled "share this drive on a network" , I agree
with LV but for another reason. A 'updated' security hotfix may have
re-negated security standards in your LAN. - just a guess. as long as your
drive is on your network should see it.

 

[Jim]

Yes, the Share is on.

Checked to make sure you enabled "share this drive on a network" , I agree
with LV but for another reason. A 'updated' security hotfix may have
re-negated security standards in your LAN. - just a guess. as long as your
drive is on your network should see it.

 

[Guest]

I may have had a similar problem. In my post...no replies...I said
that one of my external USB HDD seemed to lose the file
structure....folder was still present by was not accessible. I
unplugged the drive's USB cable and plugged it back in and the auto
catalog brought things back on line for a few hours.

Now, someone with a related issue suggested moving the assigned drive
letter to the bottom of the list...far away from those letters
automatically assigned by XP. Ya know, it may have worked...he says
with fingers crossed. Like you, a security patch may have been the fly
in the ointment.

Give this trick a try and see if it works for you. So far so good for
me.

Henry

 

[Guest]

I agree with the guy with the-sneeze-noise-for-a-name above. There is also a
registry entry you can delete which wipes out your drive associations,
forcing windows to reassign letters to all attached drives. You would have to
to this to all your computers not reading the HDD.

Ive used this for a HDD clone that wouldn't load windows and I'm not sure
what this could do for your network so USE AT your own RISK and as a LAST
resort (as it sounds like you will successfully, manually assign a letter to
the usb HDD itself that no computer is using), again try this as a last
resort.

Open regedit from RUN.
navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
save the folder tree (as backup) scroll to the bottom of the folder and
delete entries like
\DosDevices\C:
\DosDevices\D:
\DosDevices\E:
\DosDevices\F:
....
close all and restart. When you logon to Windows , notifications will alert
to to 'new hardware found' if successful. Good luck and hopefully you won't
need to use this method.