Old Mac Pro / New Mac Studio - using old mac as a server to house my external hard drives - will not let me connect!

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Rendidel Author

Level 1

8 points

Old Mac Pro / New Mac Studio - using old mac as a server to house my external hard drives - will not let me connect!

I'm using my old Mac Pro to work as a server for my new Mac Studio here is the problem:

I have them hooked together directly via Ethernet cable.
I can see all the drives mounted on the Mac Pro's desktop - They are all Read/Write permission. I can access the external hard drives on the Mac Pro.
I can connect to the Mac Pro hard drive through the Connect to Server. I can also connect to any file that is on that hard drive, except the external hard drives.
When I try to mount the external hard drives to my Mac Studio, it says There was a problem connecting to the server ".../.../.../...". You do not have permission to access this server.
When I go to the Browse option, I can see the external hard drives on the list but when I go to click them in this area, I get an error code saying: The operation can't be completed because the original item for "drive" can't be found.

Mac Pro OS is: Monterey 12.7.6

Mac Studio OS is: Tahoe 26.0.1

Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong or how to fix this problem?

To Note: I've run disk repair on all hard drives, I have changed their names to all lowercase, and restarted both computers.

I have my hard drives in a safe room about 25ft away, so if anyone has a different workaround, I'm open to that idea as well. I did have them connected via USB, but I kept losing connection.

Mac Studio, macOS 26.0

Posted on Oct 17, 2025 8:30 PM

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Answer 1

Oct 19, 2025 6:01 AM in response to Rendidel

Check on the MacPro that you actually have sharing properly set up for the external drives. Also, make sure when you connect to the MacPro that you are using the correct user that matches the permissions on the external drives on the MacPro.

FWIW, I have an old 2010 Mini running High Sierra 10.13.6 that I am using for a home server and can see all the shared drives and folders on my M4 MacBook Air with Tahoe.

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Answer 2

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,138 points

Oct 19, 2025 6:10 AM in response to Rendidel

That didn't work but thank you - I did try it!

That error is fairly new to Sequoia. I have never seen it associated with a pre-Sequoia host. Apple added a checkbox in the File Sharing settings to allow Full Disk Access for all users which eliminates the problem that causes that error. I don't know why you would be getting it from a Monterey host.

See woodmeister50's suggestion. When you authenticate into a file share, it gives you all the permissions that you would have for that account as if you logged into the host Mac directly. If permissions are enabled on the external drives (Ignore Ownership unchecked), the user you are logging in as would need to have access to those drives. If it is a subfolder on the drive, the top level of the drive must have read permission for that users (or everyone).

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