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I am a desktop admin for a company and I have three users that have problems with their network drives getting mapped. Sometimes when they log in, their drives will be there and while they are working, one will mysteriously disappear. Logging out and back in sometimes help but not always. You can reconnect the drive manually but we want our login script to do it. Now it is to the point where one user has no drive mapping at all. The issue seems to be with just laptops. I am stumped. Thanks in advance for any help.
Have you tried making the mappings persistent? If you open a command prompt and type net use /? you'll see the persistent switch....try adding it to the mappings in your login script and see if that doesn't cure the problem.
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madscientist... was just wondering if you ever got this resolved. I am having the same problem for you for quite some time now, and have been unable to nail down a solution. I've noticed this occur in 3 systems total.. all Asus motherboards were used. Can you tell me what kind of system you're running? Maybe we can compare notes and find a common denominator. Thanks
Dave
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Hey Dave,
Still having the same problem. You are the first person in like 3 weeks I have found to have this same problem. Good to know that its not the first time this has happened to anyone. Just to make sure, I do not lose my connection. I can still access the missing drive from a shortcut on the desktop. However, when you go into My Computer, the drive just is not there. If this is the same, let me know and we will work on it.
Anyway, the problem is only happening to laptop users. The laptops are hooked up to docking stations. This is the next thing I am investigating. Perhaps it has something to do with a conflict between the onboard NIC and the NIC on the docking station. All the laptops are running Windows XP Pro and all users have to log into the domain. The first drive that the users were losing was a drive that is mapped not through a login script, but rather through User Manager (because it is a user-specific personal drive). Now I am having one user lose drives that are mapped through the login script. Any of this sound familiar? Also, the thought that Norton Internet Security could be the problem crossed my mind but I don't know how it could affect it. The time when the drives disappear is so random its hard to predict and recreate the problem except when it happens. Hopefully we can fix this because it is driving my users and me nuts. Hope we can do this. Thanks.
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This looks like the EXACT same problem I am having. I have 6 drives mapped through a login script, but only once in a while will all 6 actually stay mapped. It's different everytime. The system I'm having the problem with is running WinXP Pro, also logging into a domain (W2K3), and has a D-Link Gigabit ethernet NIC. I've even set a domain policy to load the network first, but that didn't seem to work. I had this problem in the past with a different system, but running Windows 2000, never figured it out then either. This is a real pain in the arse.
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Madscientist, I believe I have some interesting news. AFter leaving the last post, I rebooted and went in the BIOS on my system and changed it from auto assign IRQ's to manual, and ever since then, all of the drives stay mapped. I think it might be a little too early to know for sure, but after numerous reboots they're all there, everytime. And thats the first time they've all worked this many times in a row in a LONG TIME!
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Let me know if they all keep staying. I hope these laptops will let me access the BIOS. If it keeps working for you, I will definitely try it because I would really love to fix this problem. Let me know and thanks.
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Hi Guys,
I finally found some people with the same issues as me. Here's my situation, I have a total of 3 users (out of almost 1500) that are experiencing a similar if not the exact same problem.
We have our login script (VB) setup to map drives based on group membership. This login script is used by all 1500 users, but 3 of them will not map all of their drives during login with no errors. They can manually map them, but the login script sometimes will, and sometimes will not map them as it should. One of the users have come back later (after lunch, etc) to find out that the drives that should have mapped earlier but didn't have mapped. This is too weird. Anything new from your side? By the way of the 3 users, only one is a laptop, all are running Windows XP, and all PCs are Dell models.
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Hey JBoomer,
Welcome to our hell. Haha. Anyway, I have yet to resolve this issue but I may have narrowed it down to something that I am going to implement today. I found that this is only happening to a certain group of laptop users. However, other laptop users do not have this problem. What I am looking at now is that these group of users have two network adapters installed and active so I think it could be a conflict. I have checked other laptop users who do not have this problem and they only have one network adapter installed and/or active. So check your device managers and see if the problem machines are similar and let me know. Thanks guys and hopefully we are getting closer with a group effort.
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Well I disabled the other network adapter and no drives disappeared for the whole day so I was hopeful. But this morning I got an email saying on of the drives the is mapped through a login script disappeared and after logging out once and back in they all came back. But they should all be there first time. Let me ask you guys something, what do you know about cache credentials? I have read somewhere that it can cause problems with drive mappings. This could be the problem because the laptops are using cache credentials. However, I doubt your workstations are. There has to be something.
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Hi guys,
Just to let you know that we're also experiencing the exact same problem. We're moving our network over to Active Directory from Netware and we seem to be getting this problem all the time when we login with the newly imaged workstations. Sometimes the drives will appear in explorer, sometimes they wont, but if you go to map a drive then they will appear in the list and they will also open if you manually type the drive letter in the explorer location bar. We can't find any pattern at all.
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Hey TEJ,
We are currently on an NT4 system but will be moving to Active Directory around the end of month. I was kind of hoping that AD would solve this problem but I guess it won't. I have found this problem on other forums and it seems like the problem is fixed in more than one way. Nobody seems to fix their problem in the same way. One person changes IRQs, another makes changes in group policy, but nothing is very similar. I have tried all of these solutions and none seem to work so I guess this problem has many factors.
TEJ, what kind of machines is it happenening on? Like I said its only happening to 3 laptop users. These users are really the only true laptop users in that they actually take and use their laptop offsite. They all run Windows XP (recently upgraded which is when the problem began so I can only assume the answer is somewhere either in group policy or the security template assigned to laptops). Many people have dropped out of this discussion but I hope to still resolve this issue. Thanks guys.
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We're getting the problem on PCs running Windows XP Pro using Active Directory, we map the drives via VBS login scripts. before we imaged them they were running Windows XP Pro and Novell Netware (mapping the drives via the Novell login scripts), and working fine.
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JBoomer, is there any difference between the 3 PCs experiencing the problem and the others that are working fine? We're still in the process of imaging our 700 or so PCs and so far this problem is occuring on most of them.
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Well TEJ if they are happening on all your PCs, then I can only guess that its a group policy somewhere that is screwy, because AD is probably pushing it out to all your machines. Have you tried to select the option to turn off fast logon? If all your drives are mapped via a login script, try to go into your group policy and let the network fully initialize before executing the login script. I am curious to see if that works for you. I had already tried that on my machines without success but many others I have talked to have fixed this issue by doing that. Try it and let me know if it works and I will continue to research it. Thanks.
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I have recently taken over MIS duties at a small shop with about 20 computers. All XP Pro connected to a Windows 2K AD. I didnt set it up originally so cannot vouch for the initial installation.
However, our odyssey into this problem just started after the latest round of "updates" and patches from MS.
We have 3 Dells (all 4100 models) that now lose their drive mapping approximately 1 hour after booting. If this was truly an IRQ or group policy problem, I would assume the problem would have been apparent longe before last week?
Any help would be appreciated...
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I have a similar problem, we have twenty users, 1 with a Dell Optiplex keeps coming up with wrong mapped drive. His homedrive is set to \\servername\userfolders\hisfolder, this is a standard for all users, after restarting his always restarts in \\servername\userfolders. I cannot see an issue in AD, no problem remapping to hisfolder, but keeps losing it.
Any suggestions greatly appreciated
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I've been on holiday for the last week, just got back today. I'll try those changes to AD and let you know how it goes.
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I think I've solved the problem, I don't know if it will work for you (I hope it does), but it seems to work for us.
The Problem:
Basicly the problem was with scripts calling scripts. We have a "parent" script which is launched from AD, this script figures out where a user is physically located and calls a seperate script to connect printers and another script to map drives. So basicly we have a "parent" script which runs 2 seperate "child" scripts.
The problem is this... When a script finishes executing its commands it closes itself as well as any child scripts that it has run, even if the child scripts are only half way through! The result is that the child script which maps the drives has only got half way through executing when it's prematurely terminated because the parent script has completed and closed. This also means that printers often aren't connected either as we do this through another child script which gets closed.
The Solution:
When a script runs another script, tell it to wait for the script to complete before proceeding, for example:
wshShell.Run "\\server\share\Drives.vbs",,TRUE
This will ensure that the parent script waits for all child scripts to complete and doesn't close them prematurely.
Let me know if this helps any of you.
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Interesting.... our scipts run in a similar manner. We have scripts for each department. That script connects the departmental drive and then runs a general script to connect everything else that is common to all users. I will check with our server guys to see what happens. However, I wonder why this is happening to only a small group of laptop users in the same department and not the whole company. Anyways, its better than anything I got right now so I will definitely look into it. Thanks.
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OK.... That solution worked for a day, then the problem started occuring again. I've looked into it some more and it seems to be a problem with the file system not knowing about some of the network drives and therefore not displaying them. The solution that we're using at the moment is a small .vbs script I've written that will make windows display all the "invisible" mapped drives.
It does this by getting a list of all mapped network drives, disconnecting them and reconnecting them again (informing the file system of their presence). They then seem to appear in "My Computer" without any problems. The script needs to be run after windows has initialised, I've included a copy of it below, hope it helps some of you:'---------------Start script----------------
Set WshNetwork = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Network")
Set oDrives = WshNetwork.EnumNetworkDrivesFor i = 0 to oDrives.Count - 1 Step 2
WshNetwork.RemoveNetworkDrive oDrives.Item(i), TRUE
WshNetwork.MapNetworkDrive oDrives.Item(i), oDrives.Item(i+1)
Next'----------------End script-----------------
Try running it on a machine which has "invisible" mapped network drives.
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We've been testing the work-around and it hasn't failed yet. So it would appear that it was a combination of the scripts closing each other prematurely and the "bug" with the file system not knowing about all the network drives. Let me know if it also solves the problem for you.
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