Windows 11 Can’t Access SMB share from Android

I am super behind on anything creativity related, mostly due to travel, dealing with age-related issues, parental unit management and computer meltdown. This quick post is related to the last event. It is fairly technical, and I don’t go in to gory details. Sorry in advance! Basically the problem I ran into was trying to access a shared folder on my newly installed system, updated to the latest release of Windows 11 (25H2) from a file explore app on my phone. I used an account that was in the local Administrators group and it kept giving me Access Denied errors, even though the user account was in that group, and that group had full permissions to the shared folder.  The solution for this particular issue is at the end of this post, but first I will walk you through a couple of nuggets of advice based on this whole experience of Microsoft screwing up my computer by forcing updates on me.

Windows in their infinite wisdom (haha- NOT!!!!) forced an update on my computer that corrupted my hard drive. No amount of restoring/recovery worked. I mean NOTHING!! And I tried for near-on a week 🤬 Finally I called “Uncle” and restored from scratch.

First tip- make sure you try to remember to back EVERYTHING up. Not just files, but settings and preferences and anything you can think of especially if you use them a lot. Here for starters is my ongoing list as a reminder for next time:

If possible (i.e. your system is still accessible) copy files to external drives. Include
– folders under the user folder- Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Videos etc
– Books- epubs, etc
– Siser Cut settings,
– Save/Export Photoshop Actions, Brush settings, Presets etc
– Adobe Roaming files, like patterns and New Document profiles (I copied the whole Roaming\Adobe folder)
NOTE: preferences are in Users/<user name>/AppData/Roaming/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop <version>/Adobe Photoshop <version> Settings

– Printer settings for instance personal paper configurations
– Firefox and Chrome bookmarks
– Sessions if you have any Session management extensions installed in your browser(s)
– image backup templates
– Vice Versa or other file syncing software profiles
– FTP Connect settings
– Wacom settings
– Any drawing or painting or other creativity software templates
– Any new Software License

Make sure personal file syncs and image updates have been run.

Obviously you might have other software and settings and to-dos you might need depending on your system.

The next thing I ran into was not being able to update my system through System->Windows Update. Even though it had just run and screwed up my system which was the whole reason I was trying to do this new one in the first place.

Installing it directly from the Windows folder
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11
and choose Installation Assistant rather than using windows Update finally enabled me to install the newest version of Windows- 25H2.

I took my system in stages, first installing basic software like the file sync and image backup software etc.

Then I installed my Adobe Suite Software.

Then I installed the rest of my software like my cutting machine software etc.

After each stage I created a recovery drive and/or an Image Backup.

I finally got my system together and thought all was well. Adobe software was running more or less the way I liked it, my cutter was cutting so yay! I thought I was done.

And then I tried to access one of my shares from my phone. Another day or so later, I finally figured it out. Most of the suggestions/advice was garbage- at least for my issue. And here is why.

First Microsoft (MS) setup “forced” me to create an MS account to use for the installation. That requirement might be gone now but between my hardware and software configuration I just went with the original MS user account. That user is added automatically to the Administrators built in group.

I added that group to the Share permissions as I always do and allowed full access, again as I always do. Tried to access the share from my phone and kept getting errors that the username/password combination was wrong (when I knew it wasn’t). Finally I created a new local user and added that one to the Administrators group which I had also done in the past (probably because I ran into this very issue and hadn’t remembered 😁).

Got past the ability to connect to the share on my phone’s file explorer, but when I tried to copy I got an access denied error. Checked all the things the gurus tell you to check, and still- Access denied. Finally, I just added the local user to have full access rather than just the administrators group. And lo and behold that worked.

I am assuming MS did this for a reason because either the people writing the software are young and have no kids and/or they don’t care about the files running on their shares. However, I wanted to be able to share my files with my family, who are not tech-savvy, without giving them access to do anything to my files unless I specifically wanted them to. Rather than going through adding each user to each share, I wanted to have a user or group of users with full permissions on some folders and not on others. Since MS by default doesn’t let you mess with local groups I had to pick one of theirs, and so for full access users  (like me 😉) I always use the Administrators group. Which now is broken by some stupid “fix” that MS made.

Here is the way around that:

Create a new local group and add whatever user(s) you want to the group and then assign the permissions on your share to that new group. The way around not being able to create a new local group is as follows:

From Wikiversity via Google AI:

Way to make life SO MUCH HARDER Microsoft!! Grrrrrrrrr

And for now I turned off Windows Updates. 😈

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