Graeme wrote:

This is a continuation of the Fritzbox story, whereby the Fritzbox has a
USB hard drive plugged in, which I can see and access perfectly via my
laptop, but not via wife's laptop. Both connected by wi-fi.

I think this must be a permissions or sharing problem - but am not sure.
We're running W10 on both laptops. Using wife's, I have now mapped a
network drive and can see the external hard drive, but clicking the hard
drive gives the message 'This folder is empty'. Clicking that drive on
my laptop, I see the expected content.

We both have user names and passwords, and can both log onto the
Fritzbox itself, and both seem to have the same access rights.

I've convinced myself it is a problem with Windows settings on her
laptop, but beyond that?

Any brilliant ideas? Thanks.


You could try "Show Hidden Files".

The hard part, is in File Explorer, finding where the Options
thing is, and this dialog is triggered from there.

https://www.easeus.com/images/en/dat...dden-files.png

You set up the desired values, click Apply. That will set the
current folder to display Hidden (including the desktop.ini file).
You don't want to see the desktop.ini file (it contains folder
view customization info), but seeing it is proof you're looking
at the contents of the folder. For example, if the folder had
only JPG files, a special customization can be used to display
JPGs as thumbnails, and the instructions to tell File Explorer
what to do, are inside desktop.ini .

If you click Apply To Folders in that dialog, then every folder
would adopt the new settings chosen. I usually run with
Hidden stuff showing, in *every* folder, cause I'm a nosey guy.
Not everyone wants that.

That dialog is one of the first dialogs I modify after installing
a fresh copy of Windows. For example, I like to turn on
File Extensions too, so that

Report \___ different icons
Report /

becomes

Report.txt
Report.xlsx

I want to see that .txt part. Always. Especially if it is

dangerous.txt.scr

which is trying to trick me into running malware (screensaver
executable).

*******

A suitably obscure combination of permissions might produce
the same symptoms. There are "permissions" and "attributes",
and Hidden is an Attribute. The above discussion was making
a change so that an Attribute did not block visibility.
If you don't have Permission to the folder, that's a separate issue.
You probably could not look in the folder, unless some
level of Permission was granted.

Permissions include "Allow" and "Deny". Deny is a bitch,
because it's so hard to debug. Inheritance is also a bitch,
and makes fixing some problems in Windows file systems,
almost impossible to figure out. Even if you walk up the
tree and check every item above where you're working, the
Inheritance issues might still not make sense.

Even IT guys who write web pages on this topic, give up
after a while. A good article on the topic is *50 pages long*
and the dude will still stop and say "some features, I'm
not going to write those up". That's how awful this stuff is.

Jesper M. Johansson has written or contributed some
articles on Permissions. That's the only name that
stood out over the years.

Paul