Network Drive Disappears

[maevardabar]

Hello

I have been having troubles with disappearing mapped network drives within my business. It is their personal network drive labeled P:

I map the drive, check the "Reconnect at login", and the drive appears. But whenever the user logs out of windows, and logs back in, the drive is missing. It is only this drive and none of the other mapped drives do this.

The server that the drive is located at is dedicated to their mapped drives. This server has Symantec Backup Exec 12, and AVG 8.5 on it. I am wondering if either of these are the cause of said problem.

Thanks in advance for your help. It gets rather annoying remapping user's drives everyday.

 

[Fardringle]

Are your computers on a domain? If so, add the drive mapping as the "home folder" in their user account profiles. That way it will automatically reconnect to the correct path every time they log in, even if they log in to a different computer.

 

[maevardabar]

This is already in place. The home profile is configured to where it must connect everytime under user accounts. The drive still disappears after logout.

 

[spidey07]

Most any browsing problems like this are cause by a name resolution problem so I'd start there.

 

[maevardabar]

Experimented a little bit, and found something out. It only loses connection to the drive if I point My Documents to the drive. If I do not point My Documents to the drive and logout/login, the drive stays connected under My Computer. It is required that I point My Documents to this network drive. This is on Windows XP and I am using Windows Server 2003.

Could it have anything to do with synchronization of the files?

 

[imagoon]

Use logon / logout scripts. Or, use the Group Policy extensions and deploy the network mapping via AD. Using 'reconnect at logon' indicates to me that your doing this manually which generally the worst and most problematic way to do it.

 

[maevardabar]

Thank you for this information imagoon.
I have limited knowledge in AD, could you please elaborate on how I should edit the scripts, or how to use group policy extensions?

Sorry that I must ask. The person who usually does this is very busy atm, and I would like to figure this out.

 

[imagoon]

First look here:

You want the part down the page a bit that says "logon scripts with windows 2000 and later"

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/ar...Pure-Mixed-Active-Directory-Environments.html

Properly set up, all users will be in an AD OU (organizational unit). In that first picture you can see "Toronto" with a little book on the icon. That is an OU. The 'users' folder is not. (ie group policy won't work for that folder)

You can create a small .bat script that has:

net use q: /delete
net use q: \\someserver\someshare /YES

save it and attach it as a logon script using that document as a guide. Each time the user logs in then it will be run and the drive gets mapped. The first command removes and old mappings. It is a good idea to do that so you don't have a broken mapping blocking a good one.

Also be very careful what you move around, click and drag can do some serious damage in there.

The group policy extensions get a bit more complex. AD and the group policy has morphed quite a bit over the years so it is hard for me to give you exact steps because I don't know what patch level your at or which features or admin packs you have installed.

Please note... I assume your on a 2000+ Windows Domain. I may be completely wrong here. IF your running something like Samba or OS X server the whole process changes drastically.