Share External Drive Between 2 Macs

Ok, was excited to get a refurb Mini today to setup as a Media Center using Boxee. I've got a 1TB WD External Drive used to store all my media, and I figured sharing that drive between the Mini and my Blackbook would be a cinch. WAY not the case. Both computers are running 10.5, fully updated.

These are the steps that I thought it would involve:
- Connecting the Drive to the Mini
- Turning on File Sharing
- Adding the specific folders on the Drive I want shared, and setting permissions accordingly
(Don't know if its relevant (or a stupid idea regardless), but I have the same user name and password setup on both of these machines as the admin)
- Connecting to the Mini in Finder on the Blackbook.

What I found was several folders (listed as type Sharepoint) in finder ('Macintosh HD, Home Folder, etc'), but not the files listed.

I've searched, and every Solved post I can find relates to the proper permissions being setup. I'm logging in correctly, at least as far as I can tell. I've also tried creating a User Account on the Mini with Admin level privileges different to see if using that Login would allow.

I've also tried creating a 'test' folder on the desktop to share. Sharing that local folder works perfectly. Thus, the problem is pinpointed to sharing the mounted external drive. I've looked at the 3rd party app Sharepoints, but it seems that 10.5 is reported as 10.5 should be able to handle this.

Any thoughts?

 

Not that anyone had any ideas, but I thought I'd share the solution.

I noticed when I plugged in the drive that was to be the Mini's Time Machine drive, that it was instantly shared. I compared the two to find the differences, and the only one that I found was that I never reformatted the 1TB drive, and it was still using the FAT32 file system it shipped with. At this point I'm like 99% sure that's the issue, and am in the process of trying to find enough space amongst the various computers and external drives I have to back up the 1TB back up. And then reformat it. And then move it all back.