Sharing Between 7 and 10

I just installed Win 10 Pro 21H1 after several years of putting it off and would now like to have it join my existing Homegroup made up of two PC's one is a completely different Win 7 Ultimate machine and the other is a dual boot Win 7 Ultimate on this machine. I looked through search results for any hints whether this will work this late in the Windows 10 game but couldn't find answers. I still use my Windows 7 on this machine to connect to internet and Homegroup. I don't want to risk corrupting the Homegroup so I thought I would ask here about success stories. If I can get this Win 10 to join the Homegroup safely I will be happy. At least for a little while...

hi, Welcome to Tenforums.

There should be no problem, I would start with following up all the basic Workgroup settings for your new machine. Then try to access things.

Assuming that all your Encryption / Cipher / Authentication / Network level authentication / share Access / passwords etc, are right. respected and applied.

If operations does not succeed in Explorer.

Use command "net.exe" to do things... This should take minutes to do, and will tell you where your problem is, and where to look, if you don't succeed.

honestly the eventualities are numerous. But since you are already on W10 Why not go ahead ? Try to access your workgroup and come back here with anything that occurred...

Workgroups networking has become some kind of challenging nowadays, just because of all the aspects that are implied.

So don't be shy to ask.

Thanks All, for your replies. I read the tutorial about file sharing but will do so again. Windows 7 has spoiled me so I will be very slow. I haven't connected ethernet to the Win 10 partition yet since I am wanting to do this right the first time hopefully. Thanks again. I'll check back.

@dalchina, It's been throttling in my head since you posted.

dalchina said:

As you are using Win 7, your Win 10 PC will need SMB1 to be enabled. This means that there could be up to a 30 minute delay for a PC newly connected to the network to be 'seen'.

SMB1 is required to connect to pre-vista systems (2k/xp/2k3) Win7 and Win10 both have native SMB2.1 support. Some Technical sites like

Your System Requires SMB2 or Higher Error on Windows 10 - MajorGeeks

and many others... suggest the same thing...

The initial problem does not comes from SMB compatibility, but it comes from Cryptographers Configuration. While Windows 10 will show all suites available and enabled... It will refuse to use those that have been flagged as insecure and not connect to machines who offers them. Disabling the insecure suites fixes the Encryption problem Allowing Authentication to occur and therefore fixes the SMB problem in Win7 and the "network path not found" error with good credentials. Leaving you with a faster and more secure network.

To alleviate this problem I restrict secure channels and cipher suites to what is considered best practice and even remove TLS 1.0 as Mozilla already stated phasing out the connector. Security Negotiation comes from down to up. If you don't offer the minimum required that ends the negotiation. The machine must come at least with the lowest accepted suite.

After that there is no problem using SMB2.1 in all directions on all machines.





A couples days ago I reinstalled IIs 7.5 on my 2008 box and the setup did a reset to default of crypto suites selected... And I was immediately unable to access any share on that machine, from any machines W7 & W10... I re-selected and applied my Cypher selection, everything back to normal... Todays basic recommended level is slightly above FIPS. and Win7 doesn't offers that, but is capable "out of the box". The trick is to make it offer higher initial standards. I don't remember where I saw The list of Deprecated Cypher in W10, It's been a long time. But it indicated me in the good direction. Been using it since.

I've been trying for several days to figure all this out. Finally, I decided to make my printer wireless connect to our router and was successful with that. I would have preferred to use the USB connection on the router but just can't figure that part out. Anyway, my dual boot PC sees the printer now with both 7 and 10. Previously, I had the printer plugged into the Windows 7 PC and since I hadn't been able to access the Windows 7 PC with the dual boot PC, hooking the printer to the router wirelessly is okay.
When I look at my "Network" I can see the other PC with only Windows 7 on it but when I try to connect to it I get a box asking for "Credentials". I don't remember establishing credentials. The reason I say that is it also asks for a password and I'm pretty sure I haven't done the password thing on this yet. I will be satisfied now with establishing file sharing with this Windows 7 PC if anyone has an idea.
As I said earlier, the dual boot Windows 7 on this PC already has a Homegroup with the other PC so that is good enough for me.
Been trying to read the How-To s and figure out on my own buy I'm woefully behind on networking.

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So I kept working with Windows 10 and discovered if it is set up to share printers and folders that is all I need. I'm thinking about going the route Brink suggests and get NAS set up. I booted to Win 10 today and couldn't remember how I got the credential message so out of curiosity clicked on the Win 7 computer and lo and behold I could access the shared folder so made a shared folder on my Win 10 C drive and that is about all I need right now. Anyway, Thanks guys for your help. Got me to at least looking around and I found what will work for me right now.

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So I'm back. I want to add I didn't mess with any SMB settings before I was able to share files and folders. Maybe that is just for WORKGROUPs? I don't know but just wanted to add that in. I actually had to right-click the PC icon on the folder tree on the side bar to make the shared folders on Win PC 7 show up on Dual Boot PC Win 10. Not sure why but it worked.