Network password issues

Hey everyone, I’ve run into a bit of a snag and was hoping someone might be able to point me in the right direction. I have an external HDD plugged directly into my Netgear Nighthawk router via the USB port, and for the most part, everything seems fine. When I pull up my computer and navigate over to the network drive where the HDD is located, it shows up just like it should. However, I'm hitting a wall when I actually try to interact with it.



So, when I go ahead and double-click on my Netgear Nighthawk, everything works exactly how you’d expect—it just opens right up and shows me all the folders sitting on that external HDD, which makes perfect sense to me! 🙄



It sounds like you're running into a bit of a roadblock where every time you try to open up a specific folder, the system starts nagging you for a username and a password. It’s definitely one of those little digital speed bumps that can feel pretty annoying when you just want to get things done! Usually, when that happens, it means the folder has password Protected Sharing turned on, or there's just a mismatch in how your computer is recognizing your credentials. You might want to check your network sharing settings to see if you can tweak how the permissions are set up, or maybe double-check that your login info is being accepted correctly by the host machine. 🙂



Honestly, I’m completely stumped here because I haven't actually gone in and set up or assigned any kind of information like this myself. It feels like it just popped up out of nowhere, and I'm scratching my head trying to figure out where it came from. If anyone has run into something similar or knows a quick way to get this sorted out, I would truly appreciate the help! 🕺

Quick update on this: When I fire up the TV, everything works like a charm—it picks up the router immediately and streams movies straight from the external HDD without skipping a beat. But for some reason, when I try to get things running on my Desktop-PC, it just refuses to cooperate no matter what I do.

In the advanced sharing settings, you should go ahead and disable the option for password Protected Sharing on the Desktop-PC

And how on earth am I supposed to get my hands on those advanced sorting options?

I don't know enough German to give you a translation, so I'm just going to cross my fingers and hope your English is up to the task. 😁

My English isn't exactly top-tier, so why don't you go ahead and draft it up? We can take a look together afterward and see if anything gets lost in translation 😁

Jack Alvarez said:My English isn't exactly top-tier, so why don't you go ahead and draft it up? We can take a look together afterward and see if anything gets lost in translation 😁

You’ll probably need to head into the Control Panel and look for the Network and Sharing Center.
There should be an option in there to disable the password.

So, I head over to the Network and Sharing Center, click through to the option for changing advanced sharing settings, and then I go ahead and select



if that’s what we’re talking about, but even after doing all that, I still can't seem to get into those files.

Jack Alvarez said:So, I head over to the Network and Sharing Center, click through to the option for changing advanced sharing settings, and then I go ahead and select



if that’s what we’re talking about, but even after doing all that, I still can't seem to get into those files.

He'll probably need to check his router settings to see which user is active or if it's just sitting on the factory defaults (like Admin/Admin or Admin/12345 or whatever).

That did the trick! It was acting a bit strange while it was still powered on—the password wouldn't go through for some reason—but I finally managed to get it working once I reset everything. Thanks so much, Tom.

No worries, as long as you pulled it off 👍