Thanks for getting back to me Ian,

It listed them as "C on Silver2; E on Silver2; F on Silver2; G on Silver2; and H on Silver 2".

As you say, that proves that they are connected, although I dont understand why when the search was for a specific drive, it produced the host machine, - but maybe this is how it works.

Also, I've been finding out about mapping a networked drive as you and gah789 suggested.

That seemed easy enough, once I knew what to do. And I disconnected it again too, for practice.

That certainly seems a good workaround for the moment, but I'd like to get the workgroup working if I can, because with several computers and several drives on each, it might be difficult to achieve full two way file moving all through mapping.

At the moment, the XP machines use MSHOME, but I understand that I might need to rename the workgroups to WORKGROUP when I bring the Windows 7 machine that I'm assembling, into use. (I'm confused to see, via Belarc, that the Linux system in the Technicolor router is already in WORKGROUP, - but nothing else is.)

Thanks for helping.

You can have any workgroup name you like, but it should be the same on all machines. (requires a reboot on that machine, if you change it on any one machine.

You can also have drives shared but still not be able to see them or their contents due to shared security restrictions.

Hello Philip,

Thanks for your interest.

As I mentioned towards the end of my original post, I have checked that sharing is enabled on all four partitions, - but is there something else which I could have missed regarding a shared security restriction setting?

Thanks

Can you can see all the drives from all the PC's?

Do you want to see 1 drive for each PC?

If that is the case you could map a network drive from each PC to that specific drive?

Hope I understood the question correctly, your network seems to be working as it should, just not how you imagined it would?

Hope that helps

Dave