Last Updated on December 4, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla
One of our clients is trying to go paperless. They have a nice scanner and were saving files to a Western Digital USB hard drive attached to one of the office computers. The drive was shared at the root level (Don’t yell at me, that is the way it was when we started with them)
Everything went fine for a couple of weeks and then we got a call that they could not see the hard drive on the network any more. In order to work with the scanner software, the drive has to be mapped.
I’m still baffled as to exactly what happened. I seriously doubt that the clients changed anything. When you would click on the mapped drive from another machine, you would get an ‘access denied’ error. However, you could open the drive with a right-click and explore or open. I checked the sharing settings repeatedly. You could share anything you wanted under the root but you could not share the root and have it mappable by other machines.
I tried moving the drive to another machine and had identical results. A freeagent USB drive attached to the original machine was shareable and mappable at the root level
This was an older drive in the 125GB range and was a FAT format. I finally decided that the best option was to take a break, get some think crust pizza and pick up a 250GB Freeagent drive. The data copied over to the new drive in a couple of minutes, it took another minute or two to set up the sharing and everything was working perfectly…. In addition to doubling the storage space.
Anyway, I guess the lesson here is that sometimes an end around is better than trying to solve an oddball problem.