This write-up refers to problems I experienced with windows 7, 64 bit home edition. I described this in previous posts but I will do it again so as not to create confusion.
I had trouble seeing my music library in media shares while the movie library and picture library where fine at all times. The music media shares library was visible at times and gone some other times. I was also experiencing interruptions while playing songs. The folders with movies and music the media library refers to are located on a separate Seagate USB external hard-drive while the picture folder is on the main hard-drive of my computer. I would have probably noticed this earlier had my music library not been so messy, i.e., the whole 61 gigabytes of it resides in a subfolder of a subfolder of another subfolder etc… You get the picture.
The music library was correctly pointing out the location of the music files yet, more often than not, I was getting “no media found in this folder” message. The problem was one of the upper hierarchy folders , second from the main folder, down the line, and I never looked at that folder because I was always going straight to the folder where the music is organized in subfolders with artist names, just like an I-tunes library but buried in layers of folders/subfolders.
So, that upper echelon folder had a lock on it which I have overseen. I knew I found the problem because that folder could not be shared so when the WDTVLIVE was trying to go down to the last folder, it was getting stuck there. I went ahead trying to share that folder and I could not, because its ownership was taken by somebody else other than me, although I was logged in as administrator.
If I right click that folder, go to properties and then the click on security tab, I could see that in the list of groups and user names, other than usual administrator, everyone, guest, blah, blah, blah, there was one name that looked something like this:
S-1-5-21-1454471165-1284227242-725345543-1003
that user had administrator rights and a red ? next to it. If I click on the Edit button right below that box, another window opens with the same list but with Add and Remove buttons under it. In my case, those buttons were not enabled so I could not remove that account in that window even if I wanted to.
Where that name comes from, I don’t know, maybe experts could chime in here, but, to digress, that name had taken administrator rights of the folder and there was nothing I could do about it.
To remove that though, I figured I had to go back to the Security tab in the properties windows of that folder and click the Advanced button, Owner tab. Only in that window it would say that the owner of the folder was the long name mentioned above, in the Current Owner box.
Underneath that there is also a box with “Change owner to” options and one of the names listed there should be that of the administrator, i.e., you. Click the “Edit” button which will take you to an identical screen where you can change the ownership. Highlight your name in the “change owner to” box and click “Apply”. That will give you a warning window that tells you that you are the owner of the folder now and after OK-ing that you’re taken back to the previous window where your name would be confirmed as the owner. Click “OK” again and that will take you back to the Properties/Security tab window where you click again on “edit” and now you will be in the window where Add/Remove buttons will be enabled and there, you highlight the weird name and click “Remove” .
Go back to the “Sharing” tab of the properties window of that folder, click on the “Share” button and make sure that “Everyone” is on the list and now you’re done. The lock should be gone from the icon of that particular folder.
Weird thing is that, in my case, removing the lock from the upper echelon folder made the lock move down one folder so I repeated the procedure above until I got to the folder where the “Artists” folders are located. I was holding my breath because I thought the lock will propagate to all these folders and then I would have to go one by one and remove those locks, gargantuan task in my case. Fortunately, the lock propagated to only 5 or 6 of them, the rest were share free. Why to only a few and not all of them, I have no clue.
Another thing I noticed: when going to “Properties” → “Security” tab → “Edit”. Even if the “Add” “Remove” buttons are enabled there without changing the ownership, and you can erase the user name there the first time around, the ownership of that folder is still taken by that unknown user so you still have to go to “Advanced” and replace the ownership per above.
Now, I don’t know where the unknown user is coming from in my case, truth is that I upgraded my computer from vista 64 to windows 7 64 few months ago and maybe the phantom username comes from that process, but if you see the little red ? next to a weird long name or “Unknown User Name” in the list of authorized accounts, that might be where your problem is and maybe you should try removing it.
Sorry for the long instructions, hope this helps. It made sense to me after almost one month of screwing around with settings on my computer and following many procedures good people on this forum were kind enough to post for the rest of us, which, by the way, helped me in getting to this point.
