Access hard drive from another computer

[Reeves]

I have an external hard drive connected to my main computer, which basically contains everything. However, I was hoping to access these files from another computer in the house. The issue is that it's way too fiddly and fussy moving the hard drive physically between computers, and I also haven't enough room on my other computer's drive to simply copy the files. I've tried googling this and the results are rubbish.

Does anybody know of any software or a technique that exists to allow me to do this? Many thanks

[Alexia]

The only way I can think of is to set up a network and make it a network drive.

[Jovis]

The only way I can think of is to set up a network and make it a network drive.

Out of interest (I'm not too familiar with networking as a whole, not ever having had much need to be) - would this require the computer the drive was connected to to be on whenever access was needed? I would guess so.

[Pete]

I agree, make it a network share and access it that way. It's a bit of a clart due to Windows general awfulness on this front but once its working it's usually stable.

If you don't want the main computer to be on when you need to access it (as him above me points out), you might want to consider one of those USB to NAS converters and plug it into your router.

[Critique]

Would Remote Assistance work? As far as I can tell, any set of people can use it with each other, and it enables you to use their computer as if it was the PC you were on, so maybe that's a option.

[Gavin Scott]

Would Remote Assistance work? As far as I can tell, any set of people can use it with each other, and it enables you to use their computer as if it was the PC you were on, so maybe that's a option.

Network sharing makes more sense, but i use both - remote desktop when I want to, say, start a download on shareazza, and network shared folders to access files.

From explorer you can access by typing

\\COMPUTERNAME\FOLDERNAME, or map them for convenience.