Using external HD

[davepatt]

Hello,

I have transferred all my images and LR catalogs and previews onto an external HD so I can work with it on my desktop and my laptop.  I am running XP on the desktop and Vista on the laptop.  It works fine on the desktop as I can double click on the LR catalog and it opens everything.  On the laptop though I get an error message " Lightroom cannot use the catalog named "Pattinson Photography LR-2" because it is not writable and cannot be opened"  Then is says "This could be caused by incorrect permissions or because another Lightroom application is using the catalog.  You may try and correct the problem or you may select a different catalog"    I have included a screenshot.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Dave

[wolfnowl]

This is just a guess and someone else may have a better answer, but it sounds like Vista is considering your external HD a networked drive for some reason, and since Lightroom catalogues can't be on a networked drive, you're getting this message.  I'm assuming you can read this drive from your laptop (i.e. view files, etc.)  Might be an idea, anyway.

Of course, Vista has so many bugs it could be something completely different.

[John.Murray]

If you are launching Lightroom by double clicking the catalog, note that the drive letter designation is stored in the LR catalog database.  Make sure the external drive letter the drive "assumes" matches between your desktop and laptop.  If not, you can adjust this using the Disk Managment utility:

Control Panel | Computer Management | Expand Storage | Disk Mangement

or   Start | Run | diskmgmt.msc



All versions of lightroom from 1.1 onwards have worked perfectly for me on both 64 and 32 bit versions of Vista

[Ben.Nakagawa]

I had exactly same problem before.
My HDD is normally used with XP machine and no issue with time but only with the VISTA one.
Here is what I did. ( I don't have VISTA machine handy so I just puul; things off from my memory)

Connect External HDD on vista and login as administrator of the vista machine.
Open the property window, more accurately permissions of the drive.
Add yourself to the list with full control.
Make sure it flows to all the files and subdirectories.

Once the permission is set to the files, LR works just fine.

Ben