Access to shared folders on external drives has stopped working

Windows 10 Pro 22H2 (on both laptops)

I have two laptops at home. One of them has two external portable drives connected and I've had sharing setup for both the drives for several months along with two folders on the laptop. I've been able to access them all from the other laptop with very few problems. Occasionally I 'lose' access to the shared stuff and have to restart the laptop I'm using to access them in order to fix the problem but that seems to be a common thing with Windows.

However, in the last few of days, I'm having issues getting access to the external drives. I can access both the drives but have problems with folders on the drives where I'm getting a Network Error. "Windows cannot access [shared folder path]. You do not have permission to access [shared folder path]. Contact your network administrator to request access". I'm the administrator for both laptops but I have no idea what to do. On one drive, I can access one folder but none of the others. On the other drive, I can't access any folders at all. I can still access the two shared folders on the laptop with no problem, just not folders on the external drives.

Does anyone have any idea what might be causing the loss of access/permission? I've checked the shared settings for the folders and nothing seems to have changed (they were setup for Everyone to have full access). The only thing I've done recently was to use Quick Assist to access the shared folders while on another network. Could that have changed some settings somewhere that has caused the problem I'm now experiencing?

I wonder if these external drives are set to sleep after some time period of inactivity. You may want to look at the properties and see if you can change the power settings for these drives.

hsehestedt said:

I wonder if these external drives are set to sleep after some time period of inactivity. You may want to look at the properties and see if you can change the power settings for these drives.

Thanks but no, I don't think it's anything to do with that. These are drives that mostly contain media files, and the laptop they're plugged into is only used to run the media server for those files. The drives have worked with no problems at all for the last 9 months and have never gone to sleep after inactivity.

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Samuria said:

What are the permissions on the folders?

I've only ever had the permissions set for the drives themselves (Full Control for Everyone) and access to all the folders on the drives was fine without requiring any further permissions set. But it seems something has changed and that is no longer working. Any idea what caused it?

Samuria said:

If someone creates a new folder it can then be owned by that account

Sorry but I don't understand what you mean by that.

Samuria said:

If a user creates a folder he owns it and may have rights set to them only unless it's inherited from above

Thanks but I still don't know what you mean by that. How does it relate to the problem I'm having?