Sharing is Caring, Especially in Partitions

 Have you ever wondered, "I really wish that I could share all of my great songs, pdfs, or movies with other computers in my home".

Well, today is your lucky day! Today I will walk you through how to share a drive, and then mount it on another Windows machine. 

What do you need for this exercise? 

You will need two computers running the Windows operating system. These computers can be physical, virtual, or a combination of these two options. If you are not familiar with virtualizing a computer follow my post here. The post walks through how to install CentOS Linux, but the steps are fundamentally the same for any operating system. That is unless you are trying to install Windows 11 as a virtual machine. You can find that special posting here. 

Setting up the drive/folder to share

Yes, the following steps are the same for either a folder or a drive on your machine. Now keep in mind that sharing from one computer to another one only works if the hosting computer is powered on and available to the network. A hosting computer is the one that you share content from. 

1) Login to your hosting machine

Note: We will cover sharing a drive after this because it requires a few more steps if you only have one hard disk. 

2) Create a folder on the desktop. I will use the right-click method but do whatever you are comfortable with. 

Note: It is best if you create a new folder instead of using the current folder that your goodies are currently stored in. This allows you to control what is shared, without having to move everything that you want to keep for yourself and private. 

I named my new folder "goodies". 

3) Go to the folder properties by right-clicking on the folder and selecting the "properties" option.

4) Go to the tab labeled "Sharing".

Ooops!, I forgot. You will need to turn on network sharing for your machine so that other computers on your network can connect to your shared objects. Let's go do that real quick. 

5) Go to the start menu and search for "control panel". 

6) Select Network and Internet

6) Select "Change advanced sharing settings" to the left side of the window. On the next screen is where you make changes for how Windows handles network sharing for both Private and Public networks. 

7) Expand each section, by clicking on the dropdown button, and then ensure the network setting is turned on. For the section "All Networks", think about if you would like your share to be available to anyone on your network. 

Note: Turning on password protection means that the user has to know the password for a user known to the hosting machine and that user has to be approved to access the share.

8) Once finished making the desired changes, click "Save Changes". If the following pop-up is shown, you are not an admin on the machine and will have to get an admin to perform these steps.

 

Ok, now lets return to creating our share. 

9) Return back to the folder properties and click on the tab "Sharing". This is where you will find the button labeled "Share...". Pay close attention to the text above the Share button. The text is called a Network Path. The Network Path is the home address for other computers on the network to reach your shared content. This path consists of the \\{computer name}\{path to the folder being shared}.  

Note: If the Network Path is not populated or is specific to your user path, click on the Advanced Sharing button. From here, you can give the share a name, after checking the box labeled "Share this folder". Activating a share also requires admin privileges.

How to make the share accessible 

We have to assign permissions. 

10) From the "Sharing" tab in the folder properties, click on the button labeled "Advanced Sharing...". From here, make sure that the checkbox is marked for "Share This Folder", and then click on the button labeled "Permissions".

Here we will set the level at which users can interact with the folder. For ultimate safety, be specific about which users can access the folder, and be sure to give them a local account with a password so that they can access the folder. On the other hand, if we will be limiting what goes in the folder we can just allow anyone on the network to access this share having only read access. To do this: 

11) In the section "Groups or user names", ensure the group "Everyone" is added (normally it will be there by default). Then in the section "Permissions for Everone", ensure that only the checkbox for "Read" is selected. Select "Ok", and back on the folder's properties window you will notice that the Network Path has changed. 

Now let's test if everything went as planned. Start up your other Windows Machine. 

Note: If using a virtual machine(VM), be sure that both machines are on the same network. For Host to VM, the standard "Nat" network option will work just fine, and if there is a problem, you can change the network to a "Host-Only Adapter". If you are running two Windows VMs on Virtualbox, visit this posting for steps on creating a network that multiple VMs can communicate with each other. 

12) Once logged into the other Windows machine, open the File Explorer. The File Explorer is the folder located on your bottom task bar. 

Windows 10

Windows 11

13) To the left side of the window, find the item labeled "Network". Right-click on the item and find the option "Map network drive...". Yes, I know that we are mapping a folder, but Windows treats both a drive and a folder equally when setting up the share. 

14) Now just pick a drive letter at random, and provide the Network Path that we set up on the hosting machine. I do not always have luck with browsing to a shared object (folder or drive), so I always type in the Network Path myself. 

Finish the process out by clicking the button labeled "Finish". As long as you did not configure your shares to be password protected, you should be able to connect without providing credentials for the hosting machine. If you did select the password-protected option, use one of the known credentials for your host machine. 

You should notice a new item on the left side of the File Explorer window, under "This PC". My item is labeled as "goodies" then it shows the computer name of the hosting machine and the drive letter that I assigned it. 

Sharing a Network Drive

Sharing a hard disk is similar to sharing a folder. You must be a local admin, or have the local admin turn on sharing across networks. You will also need to be a local admin to access the disk management tool that we will go to next.

From the start menu/ search, type in "disk management". Open the Disk Management tool, and notice how many disks you have to work with. I am assuming that most of you only have one disk, but my VM has two disks. I will be working with the disk labeled "Disk 1". 

Disk0 is being used so the color is blue. Disk0 is where my Windows is installed. Disk1 is not being used so it is the color black.

Before I go any further, I will first allocate the entire drive so that it better matches what most people will experience with only one disk to work with.  Let's start with the first step of shrinking your drive. You must shrink your drive so that a new partition can be made. For this exercise, I will split my disk in half at approximately 10Gb. 

Next, Locate the partition on your disk that has a letter associated with it. For most, that letter will be "C:". Right-click within the partition, and then click on "Shrink Volume..."

Click "Shrink" once you have determined the size of the new partition. 

Right-click on the new space labeled "Unallocated", and then select the option "New Simple Volume..."

Follow the prompts by pressing "Next". Do not change the size on the next screen, unless you want to create multiple drives within the same space. On the next screen, select the drive letter of your liking. 

Leave all of the default settings and just provide a name for the new drive. On the next screen, verify the values provided, and then select "Finish" if correct. 

You can now close the disk management window and then open your explorer window. Locate your new drive letter under "This PC". Right-click on the drive and select "Properties".

Just as before, there will be a tab labeled "Sharing". select the button labeled "Advanced sharing...".

check the box for "Share this folder" and give the share a name and set the permissions just as you did for the folder. 

Well, that is all folks. All other steps repeat what was performed for the folder.