I have tried this from three different virtual machines running on vSphere 5.0 with the same results. All disks are Virtual Disks as provided by ESXi (not iSCSI; not NFS). All disks (C:, E:) are formatted as NTFS.
If I create a folder on the C: and share it to Everyone:FC I can access it from a client PC as expected. It's a totally normal operation. I'm not doing anything interesting with permissions or anything. If I do the same exact thing on the E: I will get an Access Denied error when trying to access the folder.
If I browse to the server itself I can see both shares but I am blocked from accessing the share that resides on the E:. I've even tried adding a 3rd disk (F:) but I get the same result. The only place shares work is from C:.
The Effective Access tool even states that my user should have access. But no. I do not (neither does any other user because the permissions are Everyone:FC).
Server has all the latest patches available. No antivirus is installed. I've ever tried turning off the firewall just in case.
UPDATE: As requested. Here are some example events from the security log.
Success event on C:\OTHER share (this one works) A handle to an object was requested.
Subject:
Security ID: SYSTEM
Account Name: FILES-01$
Account Domain: domain
Logon ID: 0x3E7
Object:
Object Server: Security
Object Type: File
Object Name: C:\OTHER
Handle ID: 0x1248
Resource Attributes: -
Process Information:
Process ID: 0x3d0
Process Name: C:\Windows\System32\svchost.exe
Access Request Information:
Transaction ID: {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}
Accesses: SYNCHRONIZE
ReadAttributes
Access Reasons: SYNCHRONIZE: Granted by D:(A;OICIID;FA;;;SY)
ReadAttributes: Granted by D:(A;OICIID;FA;;;SY)
Access Mask: 0x100080
Privileges Used for Access Check: -
Restricted SID Count: 0
Failure event on E:\TEST (opposite of working)
A handle to an object was requested.
Subject:
Security ID: domain\myusername
Account Name: myusername
Account Domain: DOMAIN
Logon ID: 0x1D8C46
Object:
Object Server: WS-Management Listener
Object Type: Unknown
Object Name: Unknown
Handle ID: 0x0
Resource Attributes: -
Process Information:
Process ID: 0x2c8
Process Name: C:\Windows\System32\svchost.exe
Access Request Information:
Transaction ID: {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}
Accesses: MAX_ALLOWED
Access Reasons: -
Access Mask: 0x2000000
Privileges Used for Access Check: -
Restricted SID Count: 0
I haven't found confirmation from MS or VMware that this is a bug but it really looks like it is one. I don't know enough about all this to state, with confidence, what is happening but what appears to be the problem is how ESXi presents supplemental disks to the OS. The problem lies in the HotPlug feature. After disabling HotPlug on the VM I was able to successfully access shares as expected.
Credit goes to this thread that pointed me to the solution at VMware's KB.