On 5 May 2007 at 20:19, I wrote:
>>I get the error message "insufficient band width" (or maybe
>>it was "insufficient resources"), every time I try to access
>>either of the two 500 GB USB2 hard drives *over* my home
>>network.

At 10:51 05/07/07, David Gillett wrote:
>I believe there's a security setting that controls whether
>*removable* drives can be accessed via the network or only
>locally.

Thanks David, I checked in "Local Security Policies" and I don't
have these settings enabled. So that's not it.

At 09:48 05/06/07, Tom Murray wrote:
>My guess is that your error message says 'resources' and not
>bandwidth.'  Maybe the memory installed on your machines isn't
>enough, or perhaps the transfer rates of the switch and the
>ethernet cards don't match- I don't know much about if a 500
>gb drive would work better w/ a 10-100-1000 setup.  I would
>look first at the memory, though.  Good luck!

Good suggestions Tom, thanks. But it turns out I made a mistake
when I quoted the error message that I got. (After discussing
it with a friend, I got the words confused with an older,
different problem that we had both faced, and the words
mutated.)

The error message that I actually got when I tried to access
the two 500 GB external hard drives over my network was
"Not enough server storage is available to process this
command." If I had quoted it correctly, I suspect that all
the people who replied to my plea for help would have easily
found the solution.

Going to the Microsoft Knowledge Base website yielded two
useful articles. The first suggested that this error message
can occur if "The Lanman Server's configuration parameter
irpstacksize is too small for the server to use a local device".
The second article "Changes in IRP Stack Size in Lanman Server"
suggested that the value of this parameter should be increased
and described how to make the necessary registry change.

It turns out that my "irpstacksize" was set at the minimum value
of 11 (for Win2k Pro) and when I changed it to 18 (the suggested
3 above the default value of 15) and rebooted, the two 500 GB
USB2 drives were accessible by all computers on my LAN.
Problem solved. And I didn't even need to know what the terms
Lanman Server and irpstacksize mean.

I must also thank Peter Shkabara for several suggestions that
allowed me to eliminate all my original guesses as to what was
causing the problem. (He mentioned that he could access his
500 GB USB2 external drive over his own network and he made
some troubleshooting suggestions.) At that point, I realized
that I it must be a Windows problem and that I should check
for the exact error message words.

For reference, the Microsoft KB webpage is at
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;en-us;KBHOWTO

A Google search also solves the problem. Plugging the error
message in word for word immediately points to the relevant
Microsoft KB articles.

Regards,
Bill

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