Accessing Western Digital NetCenter Password Protected Shares from Windows 7 (64 bit)
Update
I recently purchased a Toshiba R705-P35 (i3, 4GB) and it came with Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit and as it turned out the secpol.msc is not available in that version of Win 7. Fortunately, a colleague of mine pointed out that the procedure described in the previous post only creates or updates a registry entry, if one already exists. Below is the procedure that works in all versions of Win 7 and tested with 64 bit Win 7 professional and home premium.
Run the registry editor and open this key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
If it doesn’t already exist, create a DWORD value named LmCompatibilityLevel
Set the value to 1
Reboot
Original Post
I have a Western Digital NetCenter consumer NAS that I’ve been using since late 2006. The 250GB, 7200 RPM network attached storage has served me well. I primarily use it for achieving PDF files like downloads of online bank statements and additional backup for music and picture files. It has few shares that arecompletely open, like Music and Pictures etc. I also have few shares on it that are password protected . I must say that security is not NetCenter’s strong point, it is based on the old “Windows for Workgroups 3.1″ model of “share level” security – all you need to access a resource is a password. But overall it meets my needs and I can mount all the shares including the password protected shares on Windows XP machines and my Linux distribution without much issue.
While testing Windows 7 on VirtualBox, trying to decide whether to upgrade, one of the first issues I encountered is its inability to connect to the password protected shares on NetCenter. It is a show stopper for me, as I am not about to throw away years of archived files or upgrade to newer drive just because Win 7 cannot connect to it. It works perfectly with my Linux distribution, where I spend 70% of my time and my wife who is the primary Windows user in the house is not complaining about Win XP SP3, which is very stable at this point.
So the Google search begins…
As it turned out this is not a NetCenter specific issue as people are complaining about other legacy NAS storages as well as mounting shares or connecting to older Windows versions.
This post helped me the most as it directly relates to the issue at hand. And the solution provided by micet worked for me and I quote
To connect to my WD Netcenter from Windows 7, I had to set up a security policy. The default local security policy on Windows Vista/7 is set to use NTLM v2 only. This was preventing me from accessing my shares when they were configured to use a password. The following procedure changes the policy to allow older Lan Manager Protocols if needed:
Run MMC snap-in secpol.msc
Expand Local Policies -> Security Options
Find Network security: LAN Manager authentication level
Double click and change to “Send LM and NTLM – use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated”
Now I can connect using any username and the password configured on the WD Netcenter (you must provide a username, even though it isn’t used by the WD Netcenter).
That’s it, I am in business. I verified this solution on three machines; Dell Precision M6500 (i7, 16GB), Dell Latitude E6400, and a Custom Desktop (i7, 12GB). All of them running Windows 7 Professional 64 bit
