Can't connect to share on WL-HDD from Mac

[Nicholas Ib]

Hello, I was wondering if anyone could help me.

I have a WL-HDD with no internal drive, running the current firmware 1.2.3.4.

I want to use my WL-HDD to share access to a USB hard drive for me and my partner at home. I am running Win XP on my laptop and he has a Mac (an iBook) running OS X 10.3.9

I have connected a USB hard drive to the unit and in the settings the USB port is set to share and not to auto-copy. I don't have a harddisk installed in the unit.

On network neighbourhood on my PC I can see the devicename (as "Samba 2.0.7 (devicename)") and a share below it ("usbpart1") for the USB drive - I can see the files on it, copy them over, it works fine.

The workgroup is called WORKGROUP. On my partner's laptop I've gone into setting up SMB and set the workgroup name, and in Finder, under Network, you can see an alias for the devicename of the WL-HDD. But clicking on it does nothing ( you get the beachball and then an error "The alias "DEVICENAME" could not be opened, because the original item cannot be found").

If you go into the Go menu of finder and choose "Connect to Server..." and then type in "smb://devicename" or "smb://192......" (ip address of WL-HDD) it comes up with the error "The Finder could not complete the operation because some of the data ... could not be read or written (Error code -36)."

Can anyone tell me how I can get the Mac to see the USB share like my PC can?

[Nicholas Ib]

After lots of fiddling around with different "Storage Settings" on the WL-HDD I now have it working perfectly sharing the USB drive between the PC and the Mac.

The Mac didn't work until I restarted it - if you think a solution should work it may be worth restarting it then trying it again - it made a difference for me.

The successful settings for me were:

Network Neighbourhood Mode: Share all Partitions in Disk
Work Group: WORKGROUP
FTP Mode: Login to first partition
USB Device Mode: Sharing USB Disk

No nodes added to the Shared Nodes List (remember you've set "Share all partitions in Disk" above)

I then created two users in the user list. One which is the same username and password as my WindowsXP user account, and one with a simple username and password for the Mac (for argument's sake let's call it "nicholas").

On the Mac, after restarting first, (because I'd changed the settings on the WL-HDD but had made a few failed attempts to connect on the Mac) I access the share using the Go menu and select "Connect to Server..."

I then used the Server Address: smb://nicholas@DeviceName/usbpart1

(Where DeviceName is whatever you've set as the Device Name in "Storage Settings" and usbpart1 is the name that the WL-HDD automatically assigns to the USB harddrive attached (it always seems to be usbpart1).

I then got a login screen and was able to get into the share perfectly.

Hope this helps anyone else.