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You do not have permission to access \\DESKTOP

Anonymous
2012-09-30T19:21:23+00:00

I need advice on a situation that changed after a pair of power outages last night. 

We have a 3 computer network, 2 HP desktops running Win7 Pro 64-bit, connected via GigEthernet. and 1 heavily rebuilt Dell laptop running Win7 Ultimate 64-bit, connected wirelessly.  The network is driven by an ATT U-Verse router, G class.  We have a home group.  All computers are members of the homegroup, and network discovery is turned on.  Until today I've been able to access the laptop from my desktop and vice versa.  Today suddenly I can't access the desktop from my laptop, I get the error:

Windows cannot access \DESKTOP

You do not have permission to access \DESKTOP.  Contact your network administrator.

This is only a problem with my desktop; I can connect to my husband's desktop from the laptop and vice versa. 

The help suggestion says, make sure network discover is turned on on the desktop.  When I open the Network and Sharing Center and go to Advanced Sharing Settings, here's what happens:

The page comes up blank, and then displays that network discovery is turned on, file sharing is turned on, etc.  The "save" button at the bottom is grayed out.

As I mentioned, we had two successive power outages last night, and after the second one I had trouble bringing my desktop up.  Everything took a very long time to start.  Eventually I decided to reboot to safe mode, hit the wrong button and went into System Recovery, backed out of same, finally booted to safe mode and then rebooted to normal mode.  Everything then looked normal until this morning when I tried to access the desktop from the laptop with no success.  Fortunately the connection works the other way; my GoodSync program running on the desktop is able to synchronize a list of files with the laptop.  But the laptop cannot open the desktop even though to the best of my knowledge everything is shared and we're all in the homegroup - I didn't change any settings and it worked last week.

Suggestions would be very welcome.

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Internet and connectivity

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Anonymous
2012-10-01T00:28:50+00:00

I actually solved this myself, using the well-known solution to the "network password required" error.  I renamed my laptop and rebooted; then renamed it back to the original name and rebooted again.  I can now access the files on the desktop. My husband, who also couldn't see my desktop files, did the double rename and was able to get to my system even though he wasn't seeing the "network password" error.  So this seems to be a more general solution.

In the course of the second rename, I noticed that the laptop still belonged to a workgroup called US, although both desktops belong to a workgroup called WORKGROUP; and I made that change at the same time.  So I'm not sure which of these fixes actually did it.  But the laptop has been able to access the desktop files for months even in the wrong workgroup; so I strongly suspect that the rename-reboot-rename-reboot sequence is what did it.

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  1. Anonymous
    2012-10-01T15:48:12+00:00

    Hi Hedera,

    glad to see you worked through it!

    As you found out, there are numerous little things those outages could have caused, I would recommend to keep your system backed up on a regular basis. That way you can do a quick restore when something like this happens.

    Happy computing

    Eddie b

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