Windows cannot access shared drive

“Windows cannot access drive. You do not have permission to access \share. ”

We were stumped by this error on one of the internal machines we had set up as a shared server. We turned off password protected sharing but it still did not fix the issue.

Reading the initial error again led us to the securities tab, we noticed EVERYONE was not in the list.

Our next step was to grant EVERYONE permission to this folder. To do this click Edit

Type in Everyone and click Check Names. Everyone should now have an underline:

Depending on your requirements, set the permissions EVERYONE has over the folder. Since we wanted to provide anyone with read/write access we set the following:

Now go back to the folder, right-click on the folder you want to share then click on Permissions, click on the Sharing tab, then Advanced Sharing and finally Permissions. Modify the permissions here to your requirements. Ours is:

That’s it, you should now be able to access and write to your shared folder. To access it, open run on a different machine then type:

\\IP-OF-SHARED-MACHINE\FOLDER