Unable to share some drives on Win 11

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FieldMouse

112 posts

Master Geek
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#319094 21-Mar-2025 13:04

I hope I am posting this in the right forum

I am trying to share HDD's on a desk top PC with a remote lap top
I have 2 HDD's installed on the PC
One is a 1TB drive with 3 partitions. Drive letters D-F.
The other is a 2TB drive with 6 partitions. Drive letters G-L

From the laptop I can see Drives D-F and open them. I can also see drives G-L, but I can only open drives G & L.
For drives H-K i get a message that says that I don't have permission to access the drives>

Here are the permissions for drive G & H

But here is the Security Tab for each. G gives permissions for Everyone, but H doesn't

Any thoughts?

yitz

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#3355996 21-Mar-2025 13:19

You need both share permissions (Share tab) and user permissions (Security tab). So either you need to add Everyone to the file system/user permissions or when mapping the drive on the laptop specify a user with the appropriate permissions to log on as.

FieldMouse

112 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 15

#3356186 22-Mar-2025 10:03

Thank you
I added "Everyone" from the Security tab and that worked

Interestingly though, I set all of them the same way (from the Permissions screen) and all the others worked OK

OmniouS

434 posts

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#3356320 22-Mar-2025 15:15

I'd just like to note for other readers that this configuration is not secure. Anyone can plug their computer in to your network (or direct to device) and have unrestricted access to read, change, and delete your data.

I've come across this very thing at organisations (including large medical providers) where is always a concern that needs to be raised.

Normally, you would set the share permissions to 'Everyone / Full Control' and lock down access via NTFS/Security permissions. Granting any NTFS/security permission to 'Everyone', let alone 'Full Control' is not recommended at all.

What you could do in a non-domain environment for easy access between local PCs is to create user accounts on both machines with the same passwords. Remove the 'Everyone' security permissions and instead configure appropriate permissions for the named account(s), groups, or even 'Authenticated Users' if you have to.

There are many ways to better secure network shares, but the post could quite long.

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MadEngineer

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#3356330 22-Mar-2025 16:27

As above!

Something to help you to understand how this works: Consider you have two computers and you're using the same username and password on both of them. Any sharing you create on either of them will work transparently as when you access one machine from the other you're accessing it with the same credentials. (This comes with risk - lateral movement.)

If however you add a third computer into the mix where you've not got those same credentials then you'll be prompted for a password or be rejected outright.

A better option on such a non-managed network is to create a share user that you can use to authenticate with, no matter who you're signing in as, then assign permissions to the shares for that user. For example you might set up a NAS drive to access a pc using a unique backup user that's created on both devices with ready-only access to slurp the files as required.

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FieldMouse

112 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 15

#3356443 23-Mar-2025 10:09

Thank you for that additional information.
I'll re-look at it