I ran in to difficulties while trying to share the 500GB hard drive that has all my music and stuff on it.
Here is what I did to get it to work.
First you will need to have the partition automatically mount on boot up, and make you the owner of the mount point (as opposed to the root account). You can manually edit the fstab file if you want, but I found that using the "pysdm" program was quite easy (search for it in synaptic).
Once installed, it is under System > Administration > Storage Device Manager
On the left side of the screen is a list of hard disks in the computer, clicking the little arroe will display their partitions.
in my case it was sdb > sdb1
You will want to create a folder to mount the drive in (I put it in my home folder).
Set the mount point to this folder. Then in the box for options immediately after default type ,uid=1000 (where 1000 is your user ID, if it is a one-user system it is more than likely 1000). This tells the computer that you are the owner of the contents of that mount (by default it is root). Click apply then mount.
After you have the mount point configured you need to configure your smb.conf file. press Alt + F2 to open a run application dialog box, then enter: gksudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf and click Run.
Under the [global] section add or modify these options to allow guest access:
usershare allow guests = yes
security = share
guest ok = yes
guest account = your_logon_name_here
Replace your_logon_name_here with what name you use to log in with.
Save the updated smb.conf file. (Note: It is wise to backup config files before any changes are made, but I was lazy and didn't do it.)
Restart samba by entering sudo restart smbd in a terminal window.
Now you should be able to right-click the mount point in the file manager, click sharing options and configure your share.
This may not be the proper or best way to do it, but it worked for me.
