Peculiar problem accessing data from USB HD connected to Asus RT-N66R

[Muse]

I thought it was all working OK when I set this up a week or so ago, but now I'm having nutty problems. The 2TB Western Digital ELEMENTS USB HD is seen as a share: \\Rt-n66r

From PC's on my network I'm unable to map that share with a drive letter. OK, that seems rude, but whatever. It makes me more work to get things working, but that's not the problem I'm seeing now. I have mapped a couple of the directories under the root directory of the drive. The drive was attached to a laptop that was my server machine prior to being attached to one of the 2 USB ports on the Asus RT-N66R router.

Now, I find that I can't create new folders under the root directory of the HD. Yes, I suppose I could remove it's connection to the router and attach to one of my PC's and do that but I should not have to do that. I can't even change the names of any of those folders that I created when the HD was attached to the server laptop running WinXP.

The nuttiest thing is that most of the folders are now inaccessible from my machines! I get the following message when I click on one of those folders, such as:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
\\Rt-n66r\Page is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions.

The network path was not found.

[OK]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Some of the folders are accessible (a minority, and I'm clueless which or why). What could be going on here and how can I deal with it?

 

[Muse]

Now I don't see those top level folders in Explorer. I don't know where they came from. Something nutty in the OS, I guess. They were just phantoms? Meantime, I went into the router web interface and poked around, then logged out.

 

[JackMDS]

Make one folder on the Root of the Drive.

Move everything as is from the Drive to be under the one folder that you created. I.e., The one new folder is like the new root of the drive.

Then Configure the New "loaded" Folder to be shared as a Drive with a letter and whatever you want and ignore the root directory.

 

[Muse]

Make one folder on the Root of the Drive.

Move everything as is from the Drive to be under the one folder that you created. I.e., The one new folder is like the new root of the drive.

Then Configure the New "loaded" Folder to be shared as a Drive with a letter and whatever you want and ignore the root directory.

Yup, that's the workaround... good thinking. Thank you. :thumbsup:

... looks like I'll have to move the HD to one of my machines (not under the router) to make the changes.