Mapped network drive disconnected after booting up

[bitpfriemler]

Hi,

an old problem of Windows is haunting me again:

I run a Windows XP SP2 Home machine as a client PC, connected to a
Windows XP SP2 Professional server PC.
Some parts of the server are mapped to a drive letter, say K: is mapped
to \\192.168.0.111\my\deep\server\path\
The problem I have is that after booting the client (!) PC, the K:
drive stays disconnected until there is some activity on it: One has to
'wake up' the network connection, for example by just clicking once on
the drive symbol K: in the Windows Explorer.

What's even more strange: Accessing the data *directly* by means of the
UNC-path instead of the mapped network drive letter works, right from
the beginning. So this is some sort of work-around, but of course I
want to get rid of the absolute UNC-paths to avoid loosing flexibility.

So: Is there any way to get Windows to wake up the connection
automatically?

Thanks for any help

 

[bitpfriemler]

Hi all,

I found a solution myself: It is the "net use" command on the shell
which can be used as a panacea! (BTW: It is interesting to note that a
"net use" command lists the network drives as unavailable while the
Windows Explorer tells otherwise!).
-Anyway, a sequence like...

net use K: /delete /Yes
net use K: \\192.168.0.111\my\deep\server\path\" /Yes

....reconnects the drive and everything works fine. Even more, it seems
that doing this *once* cures the whole problem, because since then, I
don't have that reconnection problem anymore. (And if not, I now have
written a small reconnect-script which extracts all non-connected
network drives and runs the above two commands on each of them, so this
would solve the problem as a startup cmd, too)

By(t)e,
Kai