Specific network sharing

I am trying to network a group of 10 computers where there is a main "server" computer that can see all the contents of the hard drives on the other computers and the other computers can only see the "shared documents" folder of every computer. All of the computers have either XP or XP Pro. I tried something I was recommended by adding an identical user and password to each computer. Then I used a command prompt from the "server" to type the following for each computer:

net use p: \\PC1\c$ /y

I change PC1 to the actual computer name, but I get the message that it is not found. Do I need to add more to the command line? Is there another way to do this?

Is there a reason you're not using a real server OS? It would be MUCH easer to administrate across a domain than a serverless workgroup. Setting individual permissions would take a lot of time and patience and make things difficult to change.

I'm trying to keep the costs down and use what I already have. I bought backup software and I want to backup all the computers from the one computer. I just don't want the other computers to be able to see everything.

Make one user from the #1 PC an Administrator on the balance of the machines. Map drives to:
\\pc2\C$ and that gets to the C Drive on all machines for total file access.
Allow access to the Shared Folders on the balance by doing the same with a local user account named the same on each machine with the same password. Use that account for file sharing only.
Or you could redicrect the My Documents Folder to one machine ang give everyone access to the folder and use Shadow Copying. Ten machines total is going to be your limit since you have some XP Home machines in there.

Actually, XP Home has a limit of serving five concurrent file sharing connections. XP Pro allows ten.

Yea, I knew that was soemthing strange to that number. Always made me wonder why even have a Home Edition.

Okay, you're losing me here. How do I make a user an administrator on all of the machines? I have an identical user / password on each computer, but what exactly does that do?

Don't make them an Admin, give the identical user account full control over the one folder you want them to control.
For instance, you have a user named Bill on each machine as a local user. Bill has the same password on all machines. Give Bill full control over the "Network" folder on the main machine. On each machine map a drive to the folder named "network" (or whatever name you choose) on the main machine

Let's start over again to make sure I'm asking the right questions. Anybody who can give me a step by step solution that works, I will gladly post $30 to your paypal account. Here's the deal. I have 9 computers with Windows XP, all having different users and passwords. They are networked together and currently each have a shared documents folder that everyone on the network can see. I added another computer with Windows XP and backup software for the purpose of backing up all of the computers. In order to do this, the backup computer has to be able to see all the contents of each computer. But I can't put a general share on each c drive because I only want the backup computer to see everything, while the other computers will only see the one shared documents folder from each computer. I would appreciate a detailed step by step solution. I've been burning my brain for a couple weeks now trying to get this to work. Many, many thanks to anyone who can help.

I just remembered that the C$ share won't exist if you have Simple File Sharing enabled (XP Home has it locked on, XP Pro has it enabled by default with an option in Windows Explorer (Tools | Folder Options | View)).

The identical administrator username and password thing will let you map those C$ shares, but only if they exist. On the XP Pro machines you should be able to disable Simple File Sharing and get it to work, but I'm not sure how you could work around it in XP Home.

Got it figured out now for XP Pro, but without being able to disable simple file sharing for XP Home, I'm still stuck.

I ended up doing a share of each hard drive on each computer with a name like Admin32ev9i$. This hides it from the network unless I map directly to that name. My problem now is that certain folders aren't available to see, like Windows, Program Files, and My Documents. What's keeping me from seeing these folders?

Are you getting the "Access Denied" message or is it you just can't see them?

I'm getting the "Access Denied" message.

You set the share but did not set the Security on the folder. You can map because you have the rights to map btu now you need to set the security permissions on the folder, not the permissions, security (see security tab).

What setting do I need to change? I tried giving "everyone" full access but that didn't work.

Give everyone full access on the sahre as well as the folder security.

Not being able to access \Windows, \Program Files etc is another limitation of Simple File Sharing I'm afraid.