i am anewbie at linux and i have searched the net trying to find answers to this situation:

I have an external usb hard-drive that is ntfs formatted and has all the files i want to access from my windows xp machines. I installed Debian 3.0 r4 and included usb support, scsi support and i included samba.

my problem is that i cant see the debian machine at all. i don't even know if the usb harddrive is being mounted once i do successfully get my xp machines to see the server.

can anyone help walk me through the process of checking my configuration and setting it up correctly?

ok, i managed to get xp to see the debian box...i did apt-get install samba and it apparently re-did the install ...i can see debian now but i cant access it. I would post my smb.conf file but i would have to manually type it all out and i don't wanna do that right now...
what should i look for now in order to give access for read-write functions?

aha! ok, i did some more searching and tried this method i found on the net:

i renamed my smb.conf file to smb.confOLD and recreated one with this text:

#Global Parameters

workgroup = {my workgroup}
netbios name = Samba
encrypt passwords = yes

[homes]
read only = no
browseable = no

[andrew]
path = /home/andrew/
read only = no
browseable = yes




i had to add a user {smbpasswd -a andrew} to create that user ( i GUESS i had to do that) and when i restarted samba, i could see and access the folder named 'andrew'

one problem now...i have TWO instances of the debian server showing up in MyNetwork Places. any ideas?