OSX Lion To Lion File Sharing Not Working – How To Fix It

/ joeygibson

After upgrading both my Macs to Lion on Wednesday, I discovered this morning that I can no longer mount shared folders between them. I tried going in both directions, and both failed with a very non-intuitive “Connection failed” message. I went to Preferences, Sharing, File Sharing and tried turning it off and on again, but to no avail. I then tried googling for the problem and saw lots of people with the same situation, but this one guy hit upon the “solution” to get it going. You have to turn off AFP sharing, and just leave Windows sharing on. Here’s the original answer. To summarize:

  1. Go to Preferences
  2. Click on Sharing
  3. Click on File Sharing on the left-hand side
  4. Click the Options button
  5. Uncheck “Share files and folders using AFP”
  6. Check “Share files and folders using SMB (Windows)”
  7. Click the Done button.

At this point, you should be able to connect from the other machine. If you need to go in the other direction, perform these same steps on the other machine.

Steve, please get this fixed ASAP, OK?

31 thoughts on “OSX Lion To Lion File Sharing Not Working – How To Fix It”

  1. Thanks for posting this. I was getting really annoyed at this bug. It seems that there is an issue with AFP sharing between Macs running Lion. I didn’t have a problem connecting to the one system on my home network that is still running Snow Leopard, and I didn’t have a problem connecting to my clients’ servers, which are all running Snow Leopard Server. Lion has been really great so far, but it looks like there is a lot that Apple needs to fix with 10.7.1.

  2. Many thanks for your help. I had spent a frustrating evening (and night) without success. I could connect to Snow Leopard but not to Lion. After reading your blog and using your suggestion all was well – Thanks again.

    • Had the same problem, also unsharing the home user folder solved the Problem.
      When i wanted to enable SMB Share it asked me the password for my user account but always told it would be wrong, even if i EXACTLY typed in the right password. Maybe a bug too.

      • I want to echo the comments above. I also had success using file sharing in Lion by un-sharing ALL folders. Also, I had the SMB activation password issue that the previous user noted, but this was remedied by a clean install – which is not at all a favorable option.

        Also, I was ‘upgrading’ a late 2010 mini server to Lion, and it did not want me to perform an install of Lion without the server application for $50, which I did not care for. This was a second reason for the clean install mentioned above – and it has not requested I buy the server app since.

  4. I didn’t have that experience. After the mutual install, Go Network showed nothing on either machine. I followed your directions and still nothing. I turned AFP sharing back on and now the machines see each other. I think the trick is turning AFP off and then on again.

  10. I tried the function however when I try to switch the file sharing the machine hangs I get the ball and I have to hold the off button to shut the system down. To top it off my mouse isn’t working right so it is difficult to do anything. Do noty update your macbook pro unless you want to turn it into a paperweight

  11. Awesome…your solution solved my problem as well. Prior to this workaround, I couldn’t connect to Lion from Snow Leopard or Leopard either. However, I could from Lion to SL/L (10.6/10.5).

    There is a bug here affecting password parsing, AFP, and the Firewall (or SMB) in the first release of 10.7.

    Apple, please fix!

    • I am having this problem. Want to connect my Mac Mini (SL) to MBP (Lion 10.7.2). I am able to access local content on the drive of MBP… but I cannot access the content on shared external HD.

  12. The solution posted worked for a little while then I lost me sharing feature again.

    Does the box in the “Account” box need to be check??

  13. Hi guys,

    ok I stumbled on this problem as well, but it seems i cannot fix it.
    I upgraded my 2 macbook pros to LION. With SL, i could connect an external drive to an mbp, turn file sharing on, and access it from the other mac no problem. After the upgrade the driver does not show up at all (it is a FAT32 disk, i still have to try with mac partitions. And still, what the hell, it worked before!).

    Instead, when using AFP, my home folder and internal HD show up, even when i have no item at all shared in the sharing preferences.
    I am connecting with my username and password. Oddly enough, when using AFP i am granted access either with my account full name + password, or short name (home folder name) + password, as long as the password is correct obviously. I guess this is balanced by the fact that in SMB mode i can not connect to my account at all, i can access the remote mac only as guest….
    And, when using SMB, i do get to see my external hd (if shared in the sharing preferences – btw i can only choose to share it or not: once it is in the list I cannot change the access preferences on the right), but when i try to open it in the finder, i get this message: “The operation can’t be completed because the original item for “DISK NAME HERE” was not found.”

    Any ideas? This is really annoying, and the OSX 10.7.1 update did not fix it….

    • Hi Marci,

      I have have the same problem exactly as you have described. Did you manage to find a solution?

    • Hello Marci
      Lion does not allow sharing of non-HFS volumes over AFP. But I have found a workaround to this.
      You take the AppleFileServer.app from a OSX 10.6.8 and replace the one in Lion. That will give you back the possibility of sharing your FAT-32 drive over AFP again.
      The AppleFileServer.app are located at /System/Library/CoreServices/AppleFileServer.app
      Hope you can use this info.

      -Awesom

  14. Would this affect file sharing between users on the same machine? I am on Lion 10.7 sharing files with a Windows XP machine but and I can’t share a file between users on the iMac.

  15. Tried all of these tips and none of them fixed it for me. Guess I’ll have to wait for Apple. I also tried deleting the saved keys from Keychain Access (and repairing keychains) and that didn’t help either. 😦

  16. I had to turn off all sharing, reboot and then re-enable file sharing. Found this tip in another forum.

  17. Great. Thanks!
    It took me already some evenings to find out why no file sharing between my Mac and a PC (Windows) is possibly anymore after upgrading to Lion.
    I don’t get why, but disabling AFP enables SMB-Shares again. Thank you.

    • Thank you for the tip, tried it and still am not able to acces files on my external hard drives over the local netwrok.
      My situation 2 iMac’s 24 inch and 20 inch both running Lion, 1 Laptop win7 and 1 pc win 7, 3 time 2 tb samsung external drives and a NAS MyBookWorld White edition. The 24 inch iMac is my main machine so I have 3 usb external harddrive connect to him ( 1 movies, 1 tv shows, 1 music). In SL I had no issues with networking what so ever. I was able to acces every file on every machine from every machine (sorry for the bad english hope this makes sense). Since I upgraded to Lion, I had that issue where you can’t acces your nas at all ( fix that with some kind of code that I copy pasted into terminal) and the issue I am still having is that I can’t acces my external drives over the network as before in SL. When I use finder to acces files over the local network from my 20 inch iMac to my 24 inch iMac I can’t even see the external drives. When I try to acces the external drives from my win7 pc or laptop I acculy see them but can’t acces them. I always get this error code: 0x80070035 The network path was not found. Connecting the external drives to one of the win7 machines and sharing them works I can acces them like any other folders and files from my imac’s. Still waiting for an fix from apple, lion also ruined xbmc for me too.

  18. Thank you VERY much Joey for finding this solution. It worked perfectly for us as well.

    And I added your link and solution to several posts on the Apple web site for others that are having this same problem.

    Amazingly, I read other posts about this issue where they suggested using tons of Unix command line syntax to fix AFP. But seriously that should not be necessary in the first place.

    Anyway if anyone is interested……….

    Here is how I ran into this problem:

    One of the companies that I support bought eight brand new IMac work stations and a brand new almost $6,000 Mac Pro server.

    I copied all the existing data over from the seven year old Mac Server to the new server and setup the workstations. At first everything seemed fine. The end users were able to continue work just fine using all of their original data files.

    But a problem soon surfaced:

    Any and all NEW folders and files that were created going forward gave ONLY the creator (owner) full rights. Everyone else on the network had ONLY READ rights.

    I double checked my configuration on the new server. Everyone was in a FULL ACCESS group; ACL’s configured properly and propagated rights down over and over.

    But no matter how many fixes and modifications I made the RIGHTS on the server would NOT propagate down to the end users. This is a serious flaw in AFP (Apple Filing Protocol)

  19. Thanks for sharing about this issues,

    I have a mac(Lion 10.7.2) and a PC(windows 7), I just want using SMB to share some directories to each computer by guest access.

    On Mac to access PC, there’s no problem, mac can access it nice and easy,
    but from PC to Mac, it always required me to enter the username & password.

    I enabled the Guest , allow access sharing from guest, and give enough permission to directories, but always ask me for password. Only I type my mac’s account in, I can see the files which I want to share…

    Have you seen this problem former? I tried google this many times but still not solved.

  20. Finally a solution to this bugging problem. My equation was a bit different, putting to work two different cats : lion and snow leopard. Thanks to your tip they finally came to terms. Cheers from Paris.

  21. Enabling the SMB fixed sharing the files on the Mac, but I can’t share files on an IOMEGA drive connected by USB to the Mac.

  22. Go figure. i found this while trying to figure out why my newly upgraded Mac Lion (from SL) didn’t want to share folders with my laptop. Username/password errors. i even removed the one share that i was testing with and readded it. Only when i removed ALL of the shares, disabled and re-enabled SMB sharing (i did not have AFP enabled) and then readded the shares did the problem get resolved.

    thanks.

  23. I have tried all different tips in this thread; nothing works. MBP and iMac, both Core 2 Duo running Lion 10.7.2. MBP has AirDrop; iMac is too old. File sharing does not work – tried enabling and disabling AFP and SMB together and separately, restarting in between iterations. Tried removing public folder and adding other folders; nothing works. Any ideas?

  24. Thanks for this post. Fixed my problem. Can’t believe we’re on 10.7.2 and they still haven’t fixed file sharing.

    Cheers!

Comments are closed.