Accessing an external HD over a Mac-PC wireless network

[lawsonajl]

I have a Powerbook G4 with a 120GB external firewire HD that has my music library on it. My PC and Mac are networked wirelessly. Right know, on my PC, I can access anything on my Mac's internal HD but nothing on the external HD. Does anyone know how I can play the music off of the external Mac HD on my PC over my wireless network?

When I access the Mac desktop on my PC, I can see all the files that are on the desktop but it won't show the external HD or any alias I create to the music folders on the external HD. I imagine this is because PCs can't recognize a Mac alias or the Mac HD icons.

If anyone has any ideas or knows of any software that allows Windows to recognize these icons, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
AJ

 

[andyduncan]

Yeah, by default, OS X's windows file sharing only lets you share your home folder. And PCs won't see aliases (they will see symbolic links, but if you don't know what those are don't worry) There is a great, open source preference pane that gives you a GUI wrapper for the (already installed) samba installation on OS X. This will let you set other share points wherever you want, including other disks.


Click here to download and then
here is a nice tutorial on how to use it.

one thing that you'll need to know is that disks other than your startup volume are actually mounted in /Volumes/ so if you wanted to share a disk you would set the share point to /Volumes/MyDiskName. if you have spaces in your disks name that can cause problems with windows clients, so you'll want to share some folder inside that disk. like /Volumes/"My Disk Name With Spaces"/MySharePoint

Don't forget to wrap the drive name in quotes if there are spaces in it.

hope this helps. its all so confusing...

 

[lawsonajl]

Thanks

Thanks a lot for the tip. The program and tutorial were great and I am now able to access my music all over the house. This program is a great add on for anyone who has their Mac networked with PCs.

Thanks again.

AJ