Turning a basic "clean" W7 platform into a NAS - Help Please

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Bill1950

Member
Aug 12, 2016
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I'm having trouble setting up a Windows 7 Ultimate computer into a NAS. Serious trouble. I've tried a lot of combinations without any success. I've tried sharing, and turing off password protect. I seem to be able to allow "Everyone" full access, but that doesn't seem to apply to users on the LAN. This is only for internal use on my home.

I've been through the interweb and tried to get the setup working with those recommendations without success.

Platform is an E5-2670-based ASROCK Rack Ep2C602-4L/D16 , 32gb mem. I'm using the basic SATA ports, not the Marvel SATA or SCU SATA ports.

I have rebuilt the system with a clean, fresh W7 Ult install, all the drivers installed and HWiNFOo64 for monitoring. In addition to a WD 1T spinner as the system drive, there are 2 Seagate 4T spinner drives I'd like to share. I don't have any problem with the system recognizing, initializing partitioning or formatting the large drives. I just can't get them to appear or make them shareable on the network.

I know this isn't rocket surgery, but I'm just having trouble finding the right combination or that missing parameter to open the drives to open LAN access (no password protection or login required).

I'm requesting a short procedure to make those drives accessible on the LAN without any login or password, just mapped into the individual systems (all W7 or W10) in the house.

Thanks in advance,

Bill
 

Bill1950

Member
Aug 12, 2016
109
19
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I just set up a 3T drive for sharing using shrpubw.exe and set custom permissions to full access for everyone. And got into Network sharing and turned off password protected sharing to allow evryone to share without the burden of a password.

I can "see" the drive from the client side, but get:

"Windows cannot access" [the shared drive]. "You do not have permission to access [shared drive]. Contact your network administrator to request access."

This is the stumbling block I run into most of the time.

The other is the logon / password requirement that I'm also trying to get around.
 

Marsh

Moderator
May 12, 2013
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Check your host side file and directory permission of the share directory
Check host side of network share permission
Windows 7 use SMB v1 , make sure that Windows 10 SMB v1 is enabled.
Windows 10 supports SMB v2 and v3 by default.

Windows 8.1 provides much better file share experience.
 

BeTeP

Well-Known Member
Mar 23, 2019
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Just for the record, SMBv2 has been introduced in Windows Vista and to insist on enabling SMBv1 is extremely bad advice.
 

gea

Well-Known Member
Dec 31, 2010
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DE
Fine when it works now, but why Windows 7 for a simple files.
Windows 7 is out of support soon, has no modern filesystem with snaps for undelete or Ransomware protection and crash resistency, no secure sync write modus (only via hardware raid) or other modern features like encryption, compress or dedup per filesystem.

Even raid robustness or raidmanagement is not at a modern level.
Never thought about a webmanaged ZFS storage appliance?

Options are based on the multithreded ZFS Solaris SMB (where ZFS comes from) and where SMB server performance and integration of Windows ntfs alike permissions and ZFS snaps as Windows previous versions is superiour or a web appliance based on Free-BSD - another Unix operating system that works with SAMBA.. a common SMB server.
 

Bill1950

Member
Aug 12, 2016
109
19
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74
Why Windows 7? That's a GREAT question. I have activation codes for W7 and upgrades to W10 at a later date. I also have much more experience with W7.

I am migrating FROM an original Windows Home Server (2003)? It's long in the tooth and I'm worried about capacity and reliability with that old dog.

I will upgrade to W10 at some future date. But for now, for a very small business and home NAS / file server, W7 will meet our needs. At least to get started.