Windows 10 network share

Hi there,

Being an advanced Windows user I am kind of puzzled on why I am now unable to easily share some folders between my two Windows 10 computers which are sitting on the same network.

I have followed the tutorial, indeed my services were switched off (why?) and I can now see the computers under network.

I have shared an HDD (using advanced sharing though, my SHARE button is greyed out and for the love of God I cannot find why - yes, my Sharing Wizard is enabled). I have "everyone" set as default but still I cannot access the share from the other PC.

If I enable password protection, then my user is not recognised. If I disabled it, the system just says I do not have permission to access the share.

Please can someone help me? I would think that in 2018 having two Windows 10 PC on the same network would have been a piece of cake but...

Thank you!

tony359 said:

I have shared an HDD (using advanced sharing though, my SHARE button is greyed out and for the love of God I cannot find why - yes, my Sharing Wizard is enabled).

The Share button is only available if no share has been set up yet. For administrative purposes Windows has a number of hidden default shares already set up (you hide a share by giving it a name ending in $) including one for every drive. You can see these by opening a command prompt and typing NET SHARE

If I enable password protection, then my user is not recognised. If I disabled it, the system just says I do not have permission to access the share.

You have set the Share permissions for the Everyone group to have access, but access is also controlled by ntfs file permissions on the machine you are connecting to.

With password protected sharing turned on, when asked for a username and password you must supply one for an account on the machine you are connecting to. Then what you can see and do in a share is determined by the permissions that account has for the share and the ntfs permissions for its contents.

With password protected sharing turned off and Everyone granted access to the share, you also have to set the ntfs security for the folder, drive or files being shared to grant Everyone access.

setting permissions on a whole drive to everyone gives all malware and hackers a full reign only share certain folders

Samuria
Absolutely. It was just for testing purposes.

Bree
Thanks for taking the time to help me. I’ll try and report back!

Samuria said:

setting permissions on a whole drive to everyone gives all malware and hackers a full reign only share certain folders

You are quite right. If the OP must share a whole drive (I assume it's a data drive, you should certainly not share the whole of C: which would be a disaster) then password protected sharing would be the way to go. A local account could be created on the PC doing the sharing, then permissions tailored to give that account just enough access to do what the OP wants of it.

Personally I prefer to create a 'staging post' for sharing files between all my PCs. Each one has password protected sharing turned off, a C:\Temp folder shared as Temp, with Everyone having full control in both share permissions for Temp and ntfs permissions for C:\Temp. I use the Temp share on each PC as a sort of local 'drop box'.

I believe I know what the problem is.
I am logging in using my microsoft account. I thought I could use the same credentials to log onto my shares but it looks that the online account is not a local account - hence I cannot log in with that. Am I correct?

So the solution would be to use a local account instead. My share has "users" in the NTFS permission so it should work. Am I right?

Thx

tony359 said:

I am logging in using my microsoft account. I thought I could use the same credentials to log onto my shares but it looks that the online account is not a local account - hence I cannot log in with that. Am I correct?
So the solution would be to use a local account instead. My share has "users" in the NTFS permission so it should work. Am I right?

I don't use Microsoft Accounts, so I can't tell you the finer points of using shares with them, but in @Brink's tutorial some of the example screenshots show MS accounts being used.

Share Files and Folders Over a Network in Windows 10 | Tutorials

The key point to remember is that when you are challenged for network credentials you are being asked for an account on the PC you are connecting to. You can certainly set up a local account on the PC doing the sharing specifically for connecting to its shares, or you could equally well use any existing user account on that PC.

Any account that can validly sign in on the PC will be a member of the Users group, so will be able to connect to your share. However, ntfs permissions will also be controlling what you can see. Different user accounts may have different files/folders visible, depending of the ntfs permissions for those files/folders. For example, the Users folder is often shared by default. A PC may have two users, UserA and UserB. If you use the credentials for UserA on that PC you will connect to the Users share and be able to see and access the UserA folder, but you won't even see the folder for UserB.

I don't use Microsoft Accounts, so I can't tell you the finer points of using shares with them, but in @Brink's tutorial some of the example screenshots show MS accounts being used.

Interesting. That is the wizard which somehow is not available on my computer. I remember finding the reason why it is not - cannot remember right now - but I believe it was by design.

What you say makes perfectly sense. That is why yesterday I went into the old "users and groups" section to make sure my MS account was in the administrators group. But I couldn't find the account altogether. That is why I just created a local one, which is working fine when I share.

As you say, I was expecting my MS account to be in the "users" group - and my share was readable to "users". But that is not the case, somehow. I'm going to look into that, unless someone has some advice on that.

update: it seems that my MS account has also a corresponding local account which is a short version of my full name! Interesting. So it seems that if you have a john.doe@hotmail.com account and you use "john doe" to log in, your local account could be "john"... Is it just me or is that quite confusing?

Here some notes explaining that MS will use the first 5 letters of your email address to create your local account...

I use the same MS account on all my Windows 10 PC's in the house, that's why I was (still am a bit) puzzled that MS didn't make things a bit easier for such a setup.

I appreciate all your help and time spent here - this forum is just great!

Thanks
Tony