How To Setup A Harddrive On A Server So It Can Be Accessed From Anyone On A LAN?

Hello and thanks! This has nothing to do with Arduino, but I am not enlisted for nor do I know of any forums that might be specifically for this. However; I figured this forum is the most applicable as everyone here is tech savvy when it comes to Arduino and generally everything.

I attempted to google this but to no avail. All I want to do is arrange a setup so that all computers can access my primary hard drive on my server computer via either 'hard Disk Drives' or 'Devices With Removable Storage' (I'm not sure which it would fall under -- I did not take note of it when I saw the setup at a friend's house) under 'Computer' (Start-> My Computer/Computer).

So basically as an end result, one can access the hard drive exactly as one would access their primary local 'C' drive. So there should be no connection process like FTP or anything like that. Of course, I'm sure there is an initial one-time setup connection process.

I have XAMPP running, but I'm willing to download anything else (but please let me know if it can be done with XAMPP anyway). I'm not sure if one needs a completely different type of server either. I may have this whole concept wrong. Any links or suggestions will be much appreciative!

maybe this - http://www.freenas.org/ - dedicated NAS server?

Anything that is non-dedicated?

what OS is the disk connected to?

robtillaart:
what OS is the disk connected to?

It sounds like Windows of some flavor to me - he's referencing the "C:" drive...

OP - google "windows network hard drive sharing" (if you are sharing a drive on a windows box) - that should at least get you most of the way.

Thanks a lot for the replies! I found some great resources.