Question : "This has been shared for administrative purposes. The permissions cannot be set" - help on this please!

Hello. I recently installed a USB hard drive on my XP Pro SP2 machine. I wanted it to be accessible on the network to my other XP Pro machines, so I did what I normally do to make it accessible via network browsing, and via browsing from backup software resident on other machines, in that I went into the drive (G) properties and clicked sharing, told it to "share this folder" and set permissions for Everyone to be able to see this drive (everything except full control). Everything fine up to this point, but what I have noticed is that after a reboot of the machine into which the USB hard drive is plugged into, the sharing information is different in that it now says G$ as the share name and when I click "Permissions" it says "This has been shared for administrative purposes. The permissions cannot be set". To reset this I simply click "Do not share this folder" and then click "Share this Folder" again, but when I do it generates a message "This share was created for administrative purposes only. The share will reappear when the server service is stopped and restarted and when the computer is rebooted". Sure enough, if the pc is rebooted, the G$ share reappears. Clearly this appears to be something to do with USB?? and I wouldn't worry except that when the drive is shared in this way 'automatically' by XP as an admin share,  occasionally the contents of the drive are not visible on browsing from other computers, and I then have to reboot the machine or reset the share to 'my own' manual share as above. Can anyone shed some light on how I can stop this administrative share happening? Many thanks.

Answer : "This has been shared for administrative purposes. The permissions cannot be set" - help on this please!

I seems that you are trying to share the root of the drive.  This is never a good idea, and will cause these type of issues.

What you should be doing is sharing the Folders within the drive.  If you wish, you could place everything on the drive into one separate folder, then share that folder.   As long as you are running NBT (Netbios over TCP) your browser lists should have no trouble finding this share...

At least, this is how I am seeing this issue.   :)

FE