"Failed to mount Windows share" error in Samba

This is the situation. There are 3 machines in the office. The Operating systems on them are respectively,

1. Linux mint
2. Ubuntu 12.04
3. Windows Vista

The Ubuntu (#2) machine is supposed to be the common file server between the machines #1 and #3.

Machine #2 has two hard disks. One is a 500 GB NTFS empty drive and the other is a 160 GB ext4 drive. My plan is to make the 500 GB as the file sharing disk.

When I share a folder like ~/Documents using Nautilus context menu on machine #2, I can access the files easily on both #1 and #3, but when I try to share some folder on 500 GB disk, I get an error on machine #1 that says

Failed to mount windows share

I do not mind formatting the drive to ext4 if needed, but I am sure that something simple is wrong.

EDIT

I took @Marty's comment as a hint and used ntfs-config to configure automount of that partition. It is working now. Thanks

3 Answers

What you want to do is add a "force user" line to that share definition so that the remote user appears to be you

 [share-name] comment = path = /media/some-name read only = No force user = your-user-name guest ok = yes 

Try this.

I ended up using ntfs-config. The automount feature on it solved my problem.

I tried to set "name resolve order = bcast host" and even scratching my head trying to find solutions from the net.

My problem was simply this:

I have samba running on my Ubuntu server, and my laptop which also runs Ubuntu was unable to browse the shared folders. I had the folder permissions set to 700 which allows only user to be able to have read write and executable permissions.

But the problem only my Ubuntu was unable to browse those folders. My windows, Ipad and android able to browse and execute files.

After adding "force user = myusername", everything works like a charm.