Mapped Drives Losing Connections

[Thomas Anderson]

If anyone can offer any suggestions for a problem I'm having, it would
be greatly appreciated....

Our small business has a network with a a server running Win 2000
Server version, and we have 5 workstations, each running WinXP Pro. We
have a router for our LAN as well. Lately, our workstations have been
loosing connections with the mapped network drives on the server. One
suggestion I found was to increase the value of the autodisconnect
function in the windows registry file. It doesn't seem to be working,
although I only changed it recently. When the connections get lost,
opening up "My Computer" will show a red X on the network drives, and
double-clicking on them does nothing. For now, I simply reboot the
server and log back in & out of the workstations. Our tech support guy
reccomended installing a domain controller on the server. Even though
our network is setup as a Workgroup, I would think that having updated
all workstations to XP Pro would help to avoid this problem. If anyone
can provide suggestions about similar experiences, I would be
grateful!

Thanks,
Tom

 

[bcode]

You might try:

On the XP Machine, go into
- Control Panel -> Network Connections.
- Get properties on your Local Area Connection.
- Click on the TCP/IP protocol, and get properties on that.
- Click the "Advanced..." button on the General Tab.
- Goto "WINS" tab, and put the dot in "Enable NetBIOS over TCP/IP."

Your 2000 Server has NetBIOS enabled by default, but XP only enables it
when the DHCP server tells them to. But I would assume that your router is
your DHCP server, not your 2000 Server box. Enabling this should solidify
your network connections overall.

I hope this is of some help.

bcode.

 

[Haggis]

I had that problem ...two things ...check power management for your nic
(automatically is set to turn off to save power)

second ...is when you are mapping the drive select "map using a different
user name" and type in your user info .

I have not had the problem since.

hope that helps..

I have similar problem and posted it on the Windows server networking

forum. I see many others als o get it. Win XP Pro clients losing mapped
network drive for no reason (win 2K clients are ok). Log out and back in
and it works ok. Haven't found a fix yet.