shared drive problem

[juice4145]

Hello All,

I am having an issue with turning off a shared drive. I recently lost my wireless network connection. I tried to restablish it using the wireless network setup wizard in XP Pro SP2. I am using a USB wireless adapter.

I got to the screen selects drive letter to apply to the USB wireless device and the only available choices were the A: and the F: with F: being the default. My hard drive is partioned into C: and F: (extended partion) drives. So I was a little confused by the only two available options currently being already assigned drive letters. Without thinking about it for more than a split second like I should have, I selected "Next" at this screen. Now when I open Windows Explorer up, the F: icon is no longer the standard hard drive icon, but looks like a wireless USB adapter icon with the green lines next to it. I can get to my files on the drive fine, but when I go into the drives Properties, and click on the Sharing Tab, the drive is marked as being Shared. When I select the option to not share the drive, I get the following message:

"This share was created for administrative purposes only. The share will reappear when the Server service is stopped and restarted or the computer is rebooted. Are you sure you wish to stop sharing F$?"

Then there are yes/no buttons. I have been playing with this for a couple hours and cannot figure out how to turn the F: back into the standard partioned unshared drive. Anyone have any ideas? Its driving me nuts!

 

[markdmac]

I am confused. Why would a wireless adapter need a drive letter assigned to it? Do you mean to say you have a USB Removable Disk? If the latter, then remove the USB Drive and reboot the system.

Right click My Computer nad choose Manage.
Go into Disk Administrator and yoiu should be able to assign the drive letter to your partition.

Note: Each partition will have a hidden share such as C$ and F$. These should not be removed.

I hope you find this post helpful. Please let me know if it was.

Regards,

Mark

 

[juice4145]

Thanks Mark.

I was incorrect. The wireless network setup wizard under control panel was trying to read the drive letter from a USB Flash drive. The wizard then saves network settings on the flash device to to take to other devices you want on the network. For some reason, it had my F: drive as the default, and as I tend to do sometimes with wizards I just clicked through it. Lack of patience.

So I guess my issue is that XP thinks my F: drive is a flash drive and automatically shares it giving me the message describe in the orginal post when I try to unshare it. How do I remove that or change it back?

 

[markdmac]

If it is a hard drive on your system then you can't remove that share. It has always been there. Any NTFS partition will have such a share. You should note that htis is a hidden share. No users can see it.

I hope you find this post helpful. Please let me know if it was.

Regards,

Mark

 

[juice4145]

This is a link to an article that fixed my issue with administrative autosharing of drives:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;288164

Thanks.
Julian