Shared drives between PC and Mac

August 7, 2004 10:15 PM

I have a PC with WinXP Pro. She has an iBook with Mac OS X. Together they fight crime share a router. e:\ is where I shove all my porn music. How can I make this available to her to copy what she wants to her machine or her ipod?
posted by pieoverdone to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Should just be able to share the E:\ drive via normal Windows sharing, and then navigate to it from the Network choice in the OS X Finder. (alternately: command-k, type in the Win box's IP, but the Network thing SHOULD work like a charm.)
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 10:29 PM on August 7, 2004

And when it doesn't, here are some things to check:

1) Make sure She has an account on your PC and that she has read access to your e:\.

2) Right click on My Computer and select Properties. Click on the Computer Name Tab. Then click the Change button (don't worry, you're not going to change anything). Note what Workgroup you belong to (that is, if you don't already belong to a domain. If you're running your own domain at home, rawk. Note that name instead).

3) Turn off Simple File Sharing. Double click on My Computer. Go to Tools and select Folder options. Click on the View tab and scroll to the bottom. Uncheck the box for using Simple File Sharing.

4) From the finder, use the command-k mentioned above to connect to a server, but type in smb://XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX and replace the Xs with the ip address of your Windows machine.

Happy Sharing.

-sz
posted by inviolable at 11:46 PM on August 7, 2004

small chance your router is blocking port 139 internally. this isn't usually a default internally, but you might have accidentally turned it off in response to some virus threat or something.
posted by taumeson at 6:47 AM on August 8, 2004

don't forget to modify any personal firewalls you may have installed and forgotten about (guess who spent most of yesterday evening trying to get his laptop to share files on the local workgroup? i think i'm going senile. it also took me 5 mins to work out that e:/ in your post was a drive name and not a strange smilie... :e) could be a happy pig!).
posted by andrew cooke at 8:20 AM on August 8, 2004

it also took me 5 mins to work out that e:/ in your post was a drive name and not a strange smilie

Wait, is that the asshat smiley? No, that'd probably B:/

Anyway, I use the FTP server in XP because the SMB client in Jaguar had problems that often forced a restart if the SMB server disappeared unexpectedly, and now it's mostly inertia that keeps me using it with Panther. It's a bit more of a pain to set up, but it's still not that hard, and will save you a ton of teeth-gnashing if you're using 10.2 still. BTW, if any of these sharing techniques fail, it's almost always either a software firewall or overly-restrictive NTFS permissions.
posted by boaz at 10:31 AM on August 8, 2004