Sharing External Hard Driver Over Network

[derekryans]

I tried posting this message in another Mac Forum and got no results...was hoping someone here can help. Thanks.
*****

I've searched online and followed numerous tutorials with no results...so I'm hoping someone can help me. I have two laptops, a Macbook Air and an Windows PC.

MBA: Yosemite 10.10.2
Windows: 8.1

What I want to do is connect the Windows laptop to my external hard drives via USB and then be able to access those hard drives from my MBA.

I've set up the workgroup in windows, set the hard drives to sharing mode (little people icon shows on the drive), I've tried to connect to the SMB server...

Here's where things go wrong:
I type in my username and password, but on my mac it just does this shaky thing like my password's wrong, but it's not! And I tried clicking guest instead but that didn't work either.

I really think I must have missed a step somewhere but I went back and I did everything over and over again. Still didn't work. Any thoughts? Thanks ahead of time for any help that I can get.

 

[lclev]

So the hard drive is attached to the Windows computer and you want to share it with the Mac.
If you open FInder and on the menu bar click "Go". Scroll down to "Connect to Server". A window will open. In that you type in
smb:// {type in ip address of Windows computer without brackets} / {share-name-of-drive without brackets}.

When it the "Connect As" button shows up type in an admin level user name and password for the Windows computer - not the Mac computer.

I do this at work with my Mac Pro, which is not joined to our local network's active directory, and my Windows 7 computer, which is a part of the local network active directory. You don't need workgroups set up for drive sharing.

If this doesn't work post back with details of what is going on.

Lisa