USB hard drive share

[Guest]

I have three computers networked at home. One has as external hard drive
connected to it via USB. When set to share on the network, the USB HD is
visable and accessable to the other computers. I can shut off the USB HD and
when turned back on it is still visable and accessable to the other
computers, as long as the computer it is attached to has not been turned off.
If the computer it is attached to is turned off or rebooted, it loses the
share settings on the computer it is attached to, and can not be found by the
other computers until they are reset. I assume this is due to it being
connected via USB instead of being an internal drive. Is there any way to get
the share setings to remain? Any help is appreciated.

 

[Guest]

Hi -

One of the issues with removable hard drives is that they don't retain drive
letters, so shares are kinda hard to maintain unless the drive letter is
hardcoded in the system.

The first thing I'd do is fire up the Disk Management applet in Control
Panel --> Administrative Tools --> Computer Management and assign the
removable drive a permanent drive letter, then create the share. When you
map the drive from the client workstation, try mapping the drive from the
command line using a /persistent switch - this should allow the share to
survive a reboot.

For help on mapping a shared drive through a command line, open a command
prompt window and type 'net help use' - you'll get a help screen, but the
basic syntax will look like this -

net use f: \\computername\sharename /persistent:yes

Here I've assigned drive letter f: to the share.

hope this helps -

 

[Guest]

Allan, thank you for your response. I am not sure about the first part of
your directions. I went to Disk Manager and the USB drive is there showing as
drive E:. I followed the second part regarding the command line net use,
which worked and it set the USB drive as mapped on the other computer. After
all were shut down and restarted later, the USB drive lost the share again on
the computer it is attached to. I looked in the help files and it did say
removable drives can be set as static, but did not really tell me much more
than that. Should I delete the drive from Disk Manager and reinstall it, or
can that be done? I am pretty sure that when I originally set up and
formatted the USB drive, that I set it specifically as drive E: in that
computer. Thank you again for your help.