Help with My Book Live and Win XP [ Edited ]

[Slkrz]

Hi guys,

I've trawled through the forums and have not found the answer I am looking for, so I decided to post my problem here.

I just bought the WD My Book Live 2TB drive and managed to connect it to my router which is connected to my desktop computer running Win XP SP3.

The initial setup went well, it was detected and all, created a public share and mapped the drive on my desktop.

But when I tried to create a second private share for myself, it keeps telling me that the drive has been mapped to another user name and password.

I have tried to manually map the drive, but there is still no change.

When I try to specify the user name and password to map the drive, it tells me that it has been set to USERPC\USER, where USER is my Win XP account name.

My user account name on XP had a space, but since the WD drive couldn't create a user with a space in the name, I changed the XP account name to one without a space.

Workgroup has also been changed from MSHOME to WORKGROUP, which is the default one from the WD drive.

My XP account is an administrator account, and it does not have a password as well. When I try to map the drive, I put USER in the user field and leave the password blank, same as for the user I created on the WD drive.

But it cannot map the private share and there will be a login popup that puts USERPC\USER in the user field with no password.

My laptop on Win 7 runs fine, mapped another private share drive in seconds. I know Win XP has problems with this, but I have tried the solutions on the knowledge base without any luck.

Is there anything else I can do?

[Laura_F]

This is actually a limitation in Windows, even in Windows 7. SMB connections are authenticated using the first username/password you mount or access a network drive with. Since Public has no password, subsequent connections are immediately authorized with no password, regardless of whether you specify one. You can attempt a work-around by using the drive's IP for one share and its Name for the other, i.e. \\mybooklive\public and \\192.168.1.12\privateshare. In Windows XP I have had no trouble using that "spoof."

[Slkrz]

Hi, where do I put the 2nd address into? Start > run?

[Laura_F]

Start > Run, or if you select "Map Network Drive" under "Tools" in explorer (not internet explorer). For the private share, make sure to access the share folder's name first or Windows will get the wrong credentials, and you'll have to restart to lose the password. Doing a cmd of:

net use /del *

will also remove all shares and their passwords (it will unmount any mapped network drives).

[Slkrz]

Thanks for the help, managed to set up one public and one private share on my desktop with XP and one public and 2 private shares on my laptop with Win 7.

One other thing, my WD smartware keeps saying that there is no writable WD smartware partition available in the drive although I have transferred nearly 100GB of files to the drive. Why is that so?

[Laura_F]

The Smartware issue can occur if Smartware can't read or write to the drive. The latest version of Smartware may resolve the issue. You'll also need to check UPnP on your PC and your Router, since Smartware uses UPnP for connections. 

You may also need to update the firmware on your drive if the issue persists.

[WDTony]

Make sure you are on the latest firmware release for the My Book Live. That issue (No writable smartware partition) was resolved.

Tony