How to change the drive letter in Windows XP for an external USB stick or hard drive

This is a guide on how to change a drive letter in Windows XP for an external device. Here’s a common problem that I have seen: Plug a USB flash drive into your computer and it’s says ready to use, but for some reason nothing shows up in the list of drives. Take it out, plug it back in and still nothing shows up!!! What the heck is the problem? Well, it could be several things, but the most common issue is that the drive letter Windows is trying to assign to your device is already taken by some other drive or maybe mapped to a network drive.

Sadly, Windows XP does not figure this out itself (which is should) and your drive is basically lost in la-la land somewhere. In order to fix it, we need to go to Computer Management and change the drive letter there manually. There are two ways to get to the Computer Management dialog in Windows, one through Control Panel and the second by right-clicking My Computer and choosing Manage.

Right-click My Computer

Computer Management in Administrative Tools

Click on Disk Management under the Storage section and the right side will show you all of the current drives and partitions on your drive. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry, just find the drive you are looking for in the graphs at the bottom. They are usually named Disk 0, Disk 1, CD-ROM, CD-ROM1, etc. If you’re looking for a USB flash drive, you’ll see the word “Removable” underneath Disk X.

As you can see from my computer, I plugged in a USB flash drive and it’s currently assigned drive letter is F. If you want to change this, right-click in the white space to the right of the drive letter and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths.

Click the Change button in the dialog box and then pick a new letter from the drop-down list. Just for your info, the Mount in the following NTFS folder option is used if you had right clicked on an external hard drive and instead of giving it a drive letter, you wanted to just have it show up as a folder on your current hard drive. That means you could create a folder in My Documents called pictures that actually points to another hard drive instead of one where all of your My Documents are currently stored.

Click Ok twice and your drive should now have the new letter assigned. Usually, if you USB stick was not showing up before, once you change the letter, it will automatically pop up and ask you what you want to do. And that’s about it! You can also use Disk Management to format disks, determine the type of File System, and see the amount of free space available.

[tags]windows xp, change drive letter, change xp drive letter, windows xp[/tags]

Fix “\\computer is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource”

I’ve previously written an article on how to network two computers together that are running Windows XP. I’ve also written about a cool program called WiPeer that lets you connect two computers wirelessly and share data!

However, I’ve never really written a troubleshooting guide for file sharing or networking two computers. Unfortunately, Windows can be finicky and even though you may think everything should work, accessing a share on another computer may not work.

So if you’ve read my post on creating a peer to peer network at home, but still cannot access a share on another computer on the same network, try out the following troubleshooting tips!

1. Workgroup – Make sure that each computer that you want to access is in the same workgroup. The name of the workgroup should be exactly the same on every computer. Also, be sure to use the same case for the names (all upper or all lower).

2. File and Printer Sharing – Make sure that file and printer sharing is turned on for the network adapter. You can enable this by going to Control Panel, Network Connections, right-clicking on the network connection, choosing Properties and making sure File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks is checked.

3. Correct Subnet and IP addresses – You really shouldn’t have this problem if all your computers are connected to the same router, but it’s still worth mentioning.

Make sure that the Subnet Mask and Default Gateway are the same for all computers. If these are not the same, then you will have issues connecting the computers over the network.

You can view these details by going to Start, Run, typing CMD and then typing IPCONFIG /ALL at the command prompt on each computer.

4. Check Firewalls – My suggestion here would be to first disable the Windows Firewall on all computers and then try to access the shared folders. Also, be sure to disable any third-party firewall programs like Norton or Comodo.

If you find that the sharing works with the firewall off, make sure to add File and Printer Sharing to the exceptions list in your Windows Firewall and third-party firewall programs.

5. Shared Permissions – If you are getting the “You might not have permission to use this network resource…Access is Denied.”, your problem could also be that the permissions for the shared directory are not properly set.

Depending on whether you are running XP Home or XP Pro, you will have to configure the sharing properly. For XP Home, you can only share files using Simple File Sharing. It’s pretty easy because they have a wizard to walk you through the sharing process.

For XP Pro, you need to disable Simple File Sharing and set the NTFS permissions and share permissions to allow everyone access. You can read my post here on how to configure share and NTFS permissions in Windows.

6. Use TCP/IP Protocol – You probably don’t have to worry about this either, but just to cover all bases, you need to make sure that the computers on the network are all using the Internet TCP/IP protocol to communicate and not IPX/SPX or NetBEUI.

You can go to Start, Control Panel, Network Connections, right-click on the network connection, choose Properties and see which protocol is listed in the list box.

7. Username and Passwords – If you’ve done everything above correctly and still can’t connect, then you can also try making sure that the usernames and passwords on all computers are exactly the same.

It’s best to have passwords on all accounts and to create a new account on each computer with the same username and password. Sometimes it’s important to create a new account instead of just changing the name or password on an existing account. Make sure the accounts are Administrators.

8. Computer Names – Make sure that the NetBIOS names for all computers are unique. NetBIOS names are only 8 characters, so if you named one computer JohnnyBoy1 and JohnnyBoy2, they will have the same NetBIOS name.

Make sure that the first eight characters of a computer name are unique, otherwise you will have problems.

9. Local Security Policy – Another reason you may not be able to access another computer across the network is because of a local security policy.

You can go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Local Security Policy, Local Policies, Security Options. Now find the following policy:

Network access: Do not allow anonymous enumeration of SAM accounts and shares

Make sure that the value is set to Disabled. Also, make sure to disable only the setting that says “SAM accounts and shares” not the one that says “SAM accounts” only.

10. Uninstall anti-virus and Internet Security – Finally, make sure that all your anti-virus programs are either turned off or uninstalled to test out the connection. If you have any Internet Security program such as Norton Internet Security or Kaspersky Internet Security, disable them!

That’s about it! Those are all the tips I can think of for troubleshooting file sharing issues in Windows! If you still can’t access a network share, post what you’ve tried up till now and I’ll try to help!

How to create an "Invisible" hidden drive in Windows

You’ve probably read a bunch of posts on how to create hidden folders, secure folders, locked folders, etc, etc in Windows on many occasions! Hell, one of the most popular articles on this blog is How to create a secure and locked folder in Windows XP. However, hiding a folder is a tricky proposition and usually doesn’t work well unless you use something like Truecrypt.
But there’s yet ANOTHER way you can hide your “private” files using a nifty little registry hack that will completely remove an entire drive from your computer. The drive will not show up in My Computer, will not be accessible from the command prompt, and won’t even show up in Safe Mode!
Ok, so here’s how to implement the hack: first off, back up your registry as this requires adding a key to the registry. Once you’ve backed up your registry, open the registry editor by clicking on Start, Run and typing in regedit.

Now navigate to the following registry hive shown below:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\
Policies\Explorer
Right-click on Explorer and choose New and then DWORD Value.

Name the new value NoDrives and then double click on it to open the properties dialog box. Click on Decimal for the Base unit.

Type in one of the following values depending on that drive letter you want to hide.

A: 1B: 2C: 4D: 8 E: 16

F: 32G: 64H: 128I: 256 J: 512

K: 1024L: 2048M: 4096N: 8192 O: 16384

P: 32768Q: 65536R: 131072S: 262144 T: 524288

U: 1048576V: 2097152W: 4194304X: 8388608 Y: 16777216

Z: 33554432All: 67108863

If you want to hide drive E, just type in the value 16. The really cool thing about this trick is the fact that you can hide multiple drives by adding the numbers of the particular drives together. For example, if you want to hide drive E and drive G, you would type in the number 80, which is 64 + 16.
Restart your computer and your drive will now be hidden! Trying to hide your system drive (C) will not work as Windows has to use this drive to run correctly, so don’t store your secret files there!
When you want to get your drives back, change the value of NoDrives to 0 or simply delete the value altogether. Of course, having to do this everyday can be a pain, so if you’re up for it, you can try and write a registry file that will allow you to insert and delete the value by just double-clicking a file.
This trick also works for mapped drives, so if you want to hide mapped drives, you can do it this way (though it might just be easier to disconnect a mapped drive).
Enjoy!

How to create a Windows XP hidden folder share

If you have multiple computers on a network and want to share folders between them, you can add an extra bit of security by creating a hidden Windows share. This guide is fairly basic and assumes that you are in either a workgroup or domain Windows environment. Hidden shares are useful if you want to share a folder, but only want it accessed by people who you’ve given the share name to.
Of course, a hidden share does NOT ensure that someone cannot gain access to the folder if they try hard enough. It’s best to use this as an extra security step along with your other network security policies. If you’re in a Windows domain, like within a corporate network, you will find that 99% of the time, your local hard drives are shared out. These are called admin shares in IT lingo. Basically, it’s configured that way so that any administrator can connect to any computer on the network and access all of the local files.
The admin shares are also all hidden shares, so that anyone browsing the network will not see them. You can see if your local drives are shared out by going to My Computer, right-clicking on the local C drive (or whatever letter you have), and choosing Properties. Click on the Sharing tab and you’ll see that “Share this folder” is selected and the share name is C$.

The $ symbol after the share name is what makes the folder hidden on the network. As you can see here, my entire C hard drive is shared out since I’m on a corporate domain. Remember, this means that any Administrator can access all of your files at any time! So you really have no privacy in a Windows domain.
Of course, to share a folder on a home network or even in your office, follow the same procedure as described above. By default, when you click Share this folder, the share name is filled in with the name of the folder. Just add the $ right after the share name without any spaces. Also, if you want people to be able to add and delete files in the folder, you’ll need to click on the Permissions button and click either Change or Full Control.

Change is usually good enough because it allows people to add files and delete files. Full Control allows someone to change the permissions on the folder itself.
In order to access the hidden share in Windows, you need to go to Windows Explorer (My Computer) and type the full UNC path to the folder. If that didn’t make any sense, the UNC path is simply the computer name and folder name that you want to access. So if I shared a folder called MyFiles as MyFiles$ on a computer named Comp1, I would access that folder by going to My Computer and typing in the address bar:
\\Comp1\MyFiles$
As long as everything was setup correctly, the contents of the folder should pop up without a problem!

And that’s it! You have now shared a folder on the network that is hidden! Enjoy!
[tags]windows hidden share, folder share, windows admin share, administrative share, create hidden share, view hidden share[/tags]

How to hide files in JPEG pictures

If you’re looking to hide files on your PC hard drive, you may have read about ways to encrypt folders or change the attributes on a file so that they cannot be accessed by prying eyes. However, a lot of times hiding files or folders in that way requires that you install some sort of software on your computer, which could then be spotted by someone else.
I’ve actually written quite a few articles on how you can hide files and folders in Windows XP and Vista before, but here I’m going to show you a new way to hide files that is very counter-intuitive and therefore pretty safe! Using a simple trick in Windows, you can actually hide a file inside of the JPG picture file!
You can actually hide any type of file inside of an image file, including txt, exe, mp3, avi, or whatever else. Not only that, you can actually store many files inside of single JPG file, not just one! This can come in very handy if you need to hide files and don’t want to bother with encryption and all that other technical stuff.

Hide File in Picture

In order to accomplish this task, you will need to have either WinZip or WinRAR installed on your computer. You can download either of these two off the Internet and use them without having to pay anything. Here are the steps for creating your hidden stash:

• Create a folder on your hard drive, i.e. C:\Test and put in all of the files that you want to hide into that folder. Also, place the image that you will be using to hide the files in.

• Now select all of the files that you want to hide, right-click on them, and choose the option to add them to a compressed ZIP or RAR file. Only select the files you want to hide, not the picture. Name it whatever you want, i,e. “Hidden.rar”.

• Now you should have a folder that looks something like this with files, a JPG image, and a compressed archive:

• Now here’s the fun part! Click on Start, and then click on Run. Type in “CMD” without the quotes and press Enter. You should now see the command prompt window open. Type in “CD \” to get to the root directory. Then type CD and the directory name that you created, i.e. “CD Test“.

• Now type in the following line: “copy /b DSC06578.JPG + Hidden.rar DSC06578.jpg” and press Enter. Do not use the quotes. You should get a response like below:

Just make sure that you check the file extension on the compressed file, whether it is .ZIP or .RAR as you have to type out the entire file name with extension in the command. I have heard that some people say that they have had problems doing this with a .ZIP extension, so if that doesn’t work, make sure to compress to a .RAR file.
And that’s it! The picture file will have been updated with the compressed archive inside! You can actually check the file size of the picture and see that it has increased by the same amount as the size of the archive.
You can access your hidden file in two ways. Firstly, simply change the extension to .RAR and open the file using WinRAR. Secondly, you can just right-click on the JPG image and choose Open With and then scroll down to WinRAR. Either way, you’ll see your hidden files show up that you can then extract out.

That’s it! That is all it takes to hide files inside JPG picture files! It’s a great way simply because not many people know it’s possible and no one even thinks about a picture as having to the ability to “hide” files. Enjoy!
[tags]hide files, hide file in picture, hide file in pictures, hiding files in pictures, hide file in image[/tags]

How to map a drive in Windows

Mapping drives is Windows

is one of the essential actions everyone should know how to do. Whether you are at home or at the office, there comes a time in everyone’s life when they have to map a drive! It sounds all complicated, but it’s actually really simple to do.
You may need to get some information from your IT administrator at work, since mapping a drive usually means connecting to a server

share. A server share is basically a folder on a different computer that is being shared with everyone else. So when you “map a drive”, you are just saying that you want access to that folder on your computer also, which is done by mapping it to a letter, i.e. F, G, H, etc.
In this article, I’ll explain how you can map a drive in Windows XP, Windows Vista, and even map a drive via the command prompt.

Map a drive in Windows XP

Open My Computer and click on the Tools menu option. From the drop down list, choose Map Network Drive.

Pick a drive letter that you want to use to access the shared folder and then type in the UNC path to the folder. UNC path is just a special format for pointing to a folder on another computer. You first use two slashes “\\” and then the computer name, \\testcomp and then another “\” followed by the shared folder name, \\testcomp\foldername.

Click on “Reconnect at logon” to make the connection permanent, which means the drive will still be mapped even after you restart the computer.

If you’re not sure what the name of the folder is, you can click on Browse and try to find the computer that way. Click on Entire Network, then Microsoft Windows Network and then expand out the workgroup or domain that your computer is in.

If there are any shared folders on a computer, you will be able to see them here by expanding each computer individually. Click Finish and you have now mapped a drive!

How to map a network drive in Vista

Mapping a network drive in Vista is slightly different than in XP, but pretty simple also. First, click on Computer from your Start Menu or Desktop. You’ll see a couple of buttons across the top, one of them being “Map network drive“.

Other than the fancy interface, all of the options are the same! Choose a drive letter, type in the folder path, choose “Reconnect at logon” and click Finish!

Remember, the folder can be located on a local or remote server or even to a FTP site!

How to map a drive using command prompt

First click on Start and then Run. Type cmd in the Open box.

Then type the following DOS command to map the network drive:

net use x: \\computer name\share name

where x: is the drive letter you want to assign to the shared folder.

You can delete a mapped network drive using the command prompt by typing in

net use x: /delete

If you have any problems mapping a drive in Windows, post a comment and I’ll try to help you out! Enjoy!
[tags]map network drives, map drives, map a drive, how to map a drive, how to map network drives[/tags]