Issues with sharing a local drive

.So, I’ve set up an external hard drive on my PC via USB and shared it over the local network. My goal here is a bit of a digital partition—John Doe has his own folder, and Mario has his, ensuring they can't poke around in each other's business. On my main machine, I opened up those folders and, acting as the admin, set the permissions accordingly. I then went ahead and added their specific credentials as new local users on my PC. Under the security tab for each individual folder, I manually added their user names along with their network paths, assigning them the necessary rights while stripping away any unwanted access—specifically tossing out the "Everyone" group, which is always a recipe for trouble. Now, when I hop over to a colleague's workstation, the shared drive and those specific folders show up just fine on the network. The problem? Access is denied. I even tried logging in from John Doe's computer and attempting to adjust his own username and permissions within the security tab, but absolutely nothing happens—it's like hitting a brick wall. Where am I tripping up here? Any insights would be appreciated.

Did you also go ahead and change the owner for those directories? Just tweaking the NTFS permissions doesn't always cut it in certain scenarios.—I've learned that the hard way before.

Frank Smith10 said:Did you also go ahead and swap out the owner for those directories? Sometimes just tweaking the NTFS permissions doesn't quite cut it—it's one of those "not enough" situations depending on how deep the restrictions go.

Yeah, I did. Honestly, it’s driving me a bit crazy—I can pull up the folder on one machine without a hitch, but then I hop over to another one and it acts like I don't even have permission to look at it... even though the settings are identical.

northernmason5 said:Yeah. I don't get it. I can access it fine on one PC, but then I try on another one and it won't even let me open the folder... and the settings are identical.

When you're trying to hit that shared drive from the other machine, does it ask for a username and password from that second computer? You know, like using the local user credentials from the machine actually hosting the shared disk.
Is that what's happening?

John Cook72 said:When you try to access a shared drive from another computer, you have to log in using the username and password from that second machine—basically, the local user account that actually owns the shared disk.
Is that actually how it works?

Yep, exactly like that.

northernmason5 said:Yeah

And if you're looking at a shared PC where someone's actually logged in, just check the "shared files" folder under Computer Management, right?

John Cook72 said:If you're looking at a shared machine where someone is actually logged in—you know, checking the "shared files" folder or digging through Computer Management—what does the card actually show?

It's sorted. After the weekend passed, everything just... settled into place on its own. Honestly, I have no clue why it didn't work the first time we tried. Thanks for all the effort put into this!