Sharing the root of windows Vista for a WinXP machine or: OMG, damn thing!
December 6, 2007 by multesimus
Another day, another blogpost. Today a techrelated post, or software related if you wish 
Some two weeks ago I was ata customer who wanted his new laptop, with vista home premium, to be able to interact with his two winxp desktops. No problem at all since the xp machines were allready configured to share certain drives for both audio and video. So I started configuring the laptop, installing AVG free for virus protection, office, you know the drill. Getting access to the winxp machines was, well, done in a sec. Getting the xp machines to access the d-drive was easy as well, but somehow, sharing the c drive did appear to work, but no access was given… I was supposed to have the wrong credentials (xp-machine) and was denied access.
I managed to find a small workaround since, after all, he didn’t need the root to be shared it was ok if I just made a subfolder on c and shared that one, well that said and done, I got paid and went home. To be called a few hours later that the whole system had gone awry… The office icons were gone, office could neither be removed nor repaired or installed, something had gone wrong, real wrong. So we made a new appointment to set things straight, because I never, NEVER haven’t solved an it-related problem.
So I went over there yesterday, started messing with the system, but my only option was to, unfortunately, use system restore, after which I needed to config the thing again… After a lot of thinking, searching and trying I finally came up with the solution. And it’s not the one you’re most likely to find online, where you’re advised to change a regvalue to 1, or even add it and then change it’s dword value to 1. Not a good solution, since that thing most likely caused the software problems.
After some more thinking, I’ve done this before at the same customer, but just couldn’t figure out how I did it, I got a clear moment, one at which I just saw how to fix this. So for all of you having the same problem, the solution is as follows:
1. Boot vista into safe mode (you know, pressing F8->safe mode)
2. Go to explorer and the properties of the c-drive
3. There you can, after some searching, find a tab about permissions
4. Set all tabs, except ownership, to ‘everyone’
5. Ok->ok, reboot done!
K, gotta run now, to another job 
