Network Can't Access Vista's D-drive Partition

[superintelligentone]

I just bought an Acer computer with a 500 Gig hard drive. It's got Vista as its operating System.

Acer partitioned the drive as a C drive for operating systems and a D drive for Data such as Music, Videos, Pictures, and Documents. They say that having the Data contain in the D partition will protect the files from loss.

The hard drive is partitioned into three partitions by design. If you look in My Computer you will see two of these partitions, Acer C and AcerData D. Acer C is where the operating system and all software is installed. AcerData D is for you to use as storage. This protects your data. If you ever have to reformat due to a virus or other corruption, the data in the AcerData D will not be erased. The third partition is not shown in My Computer. This partition has the files necessary for the Acer eRecovery

It seems as if Vista only permits my Networked computers (One is XP and the other is Win 2000) to access the 'Public' folder which is on the C: Drive.

I've set the Vista to share the C drive and the D drive, and provide Full Access. I see that it has the Shared symbol and the description reads as 'Shared'.

But when I use the XP and the 2000 computers to look at the Vista computer, only the 'Public' folder is accessible. I can see that C, D, and Public are available to the Network, but only the Public folder can open. The others give a "Not Accessible. Access Is Denied" error.

I even tried to make the folders in the D drive accessible by making it Shared, but I still get the "D is not Accessible. Access is Denied" error.

I tried to make a Shortcut to D and drag it to the 'Public' folder, but that doesn't make the D available for sharing.

Is there any way to make the D partition accessible to the Network? I like the idea of it protecting the data files by being partition from the operating system.

To give you unrestricted access across the network, make Everyone appear in
the Security Tab. Go to the D drive in Disk Management, right-click it >
Properties > Security Tab > Edit > Add then type ‘Everyone’ (not the quotes)
and below it select your preferences, e.g. Read or Full Control. Now Apply,
OK etc. to finish.

Why make it available? It only contains recovery software to allow
you to restore the Acer-supplied version of Vista, just as it was when
you bought the system (probably with all other programs and data wiped
out). There is no software there that will protect additional data
that you might write to that partition. At least, that's what is
sounds as though you want.

Consistent advice on this (and other) BGs is to leave the OEM-supplied
recovery partition UNTOUCHED!

[superintelligentone]

Thank you! Your advice works.

I don't know why the Acer Technician said that making the D-partition Public was beyond his knowledge. He made it sound like a complex process and/or a Microsoft secret.

Thanks again.

Hi Jay,

The Acer Technician said that they intended for their users to store their data files on D partition and reserve the C partition for Program Files.

And since the D partition is 227 Gigs in size, leaving it untouched is a huge waste of space.

On Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:19:44 +0530, superintelligentone
<superintelligentone.336grg@DoNotSpam.com> wrote:

>
>Thank you! Your advice works.
>
>I don't know why the Acer Technician said that making the D-partition
>Public was beyond his knowledge. He made it sound like a complex
>process and/or a Microsoft secret.
>
>Thanks again.
>
>Hi Jay,
>
>The Acer Technician said that they intended for their users to store
>their data files on D partition and reserve the C partition for Program
>Files.
>
>And since the D partition is 227 Gigs in size, leaving it untouched is
>a huge waste of space.

That makes sense. Clearly Acer does things differently from some
other OEMs, like HP.
However, don't assign a different drive letter to that partition, or
Acer's recovery setup probably won't work, should tyou ever need it.
--
Jay (remove dashes for legal email address)