Mapped network drives don't reconnect at logon

[Bob Weissman]

I have seem some discussion of this issue in recent weeks, but have yet
to encounter a solution. If this has been beaten to death, forgive me,
but *please* tell me the answer.

I'm running Windows XP Home SP2 with all the recent patches
automatically downloaded.

Starting sometime in recent days, mapped network drives fail to
reconnect at boot/logon time. The drives appear as "disconnected network
drive"s in My Computer. Opening the drives shows their contents
correctly, and ever after (until next boot), the drives are properly
connected.

The problem is that this is a manual process, and my automatic backup
program wants to see the network drives at startup time. This leaves me
with a lot of manual startup-time work to get the drives reconnected and
the backup working.

I've tried both the Windows interface and the NET USE ... /PERSISTENT:YES
commands to get the drives to reconnect at logon, but these haven't
worked. I've disconnected, unmapped, and remapped everything.

I am open to any solutions at this point.

Thanks,
- Bob

 

[Bob]

Bob,

I'm just going to tag along and hopefully someone has an answer. I have a
clients network with 6 WinXP Home workstations and 1 pseudo Server with
WinXP Pro. The problem I'm seeing is the mapped drives will
(intermittently) not reconnect after a reboot. I've done a lot of looking
and searching KB articles and tried various things but the problem persists.

Just to let you know - you're not alone.....and I would love to see it
beaten to death with something new that I haven't tried.

Bob S

 

[Malke]

Bob,

I'm just going to tag along and hopefully someone has an answer. I
have a clients network with 6 WinXP Home workstations and 1 pseudo
Server with
WinXP Pro. The problem I'm seeing is the mapped drives will
(intermittently) not reconnect after a reboot. I've done a lot of
looking and searching KB articles and tried various things but the
problem persists.

Just to let you know - you're not alone.....and I would love to see it
beaten to death with something new that I haven't tried.

Bob S

Bob (the second Bob) - You may want to post your question separately
because Bob Weissman's problems may sound similar to yours but the
causes could be very different. In the meantime - for both of you - you
may be running into the concurrent connections limitation. Since Bob
Weissman didn't tell us the number of computers in his network or if he
has a server running a real server operating system, this is a guess.

The concurrent connections limitation does not refer to *computers*
making a connection; one computer can make several connections to the
machine you are using as a server. Here is information about that:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=314882 - Inbound connections limit in
XP

Concurrent connections:

10 for XP Pro/Tablet/MCE
5 for XP Home
49 for SBS 2000
74 for SBS 2003
Unlimited for full Server O/Ses

Malke

 

[Bob Weissman]

Bob (the second Bob) - You may want to post your question separately
because Bob Weissman's problems may sound similar to yours but the
causes could be very different. In the meantime - for both of you - you
may be running into the concurrent connections limitation. Since Bob
Weissman didn't tell us the number of computers in his network or if he
has a server running a real server operating system, this is a guess.

The concurrent connections limitation does not refer to *computers*
making a connection; one computer can make several connections to the
machine you are using as a server. Here is information about that:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=314882 - Inbound connections limit in
XP

Concurrent connections:

10 for XP Pro/Tablet/MCE
5 for XP Home
49 for SBS 2000
74 for SBS 2003
Unlimited for full Server O/Ses

Malke

Malke, thanks for the reply. I can't imagine I'm hitting the connections
limit because my network is almost minimally tiny. I have three hosts on
the network: a desktop computer, a laptop computer, and a network hard
drive. The failure is occurring on the laptop, which is trying to mount
the two other hosts. The desktop and network drive are hard-wired to the
router, and the laptop is using a wireless connection.

This was all working fine right up until I changed things. ("Tweak it
until it breaks" has always been my motto.)

I was hoping my problem was generic enough that the details wouldn't
matter. Wrong again. Here's what's changed. Maybe you or someone will
recognize this.

This last week I switched my ISP from SBC-Yahoo DSL to Comcast cable,
because at my location, cable is about 8x faster than DSL.

Seeing the increased speed for the WAN connection motivated me to
upgrade my wireless LAN as well, from 802.11b to 802.11g. I switched
from a Linksys router & WiFi card to a D-Link ("pre-N super-G") pair.
All works fine except for the failure of the drives to reconnect on the
laptop.

In order to get the Comcast setup running, I ran the Comcast setup disk
on the laptop while it was hardwired to the cable modem, thus not
connected to the rest of the then-still-existing DSL-based network.
Then, after getting the D-Link wireless card, I ran D-Link setup
software/driver install on the laptop.

This brings us up to date. Either the Comcast or the D-Link software
could be the culprit, or some combination of the two. I shudder to
consider attempting to get tech support from Comcast or D-Link, due to
the hours of "first prove to the phone rep that you're not a complete
idiot," not to mention "it must be the fault of some other part of your
network which we don't support" which that always entails.

Any ideas appreciated.

- Bob

 

[Malke]

Malke, thanks for the reply. I can't imagine I'm hitting the
connections limit because my network is almost minimally tiny. I have
three hosts on the network: a desktop computer, a laptop computer, and
a network hard drive. The failure is occurring on the laptop, which is
trying to mount the two other hosts. The desktop and network drive are
hard-wired to the router, and the laptop is using a wireless
connection.

This was all working fine right up until I changed things. ("Tweak it
until it breaks" has always been my motto.)

I was hoping my problem was generic enough that the details wouldn't
matter. Wrong again. Here's what's changed. Maybe you or someone will
recognize this.

This last week I switched my ISP from SBC-Yahoo DSL to Comcast cable,
because at my location, cable is about 8x faster than DSL.

Seeing the increased speed for the WAN connection motivated me to
upgrade my wireless LAN as well, from 802.11b to 802.11g. I switched
from a Linksys router & WiFi card to a D-Link ("pre-N super-G") pair.
All works fine except for the failure of the drives to reconnect on
the laptop.

In order to get the Comcast setup running, I ran the Comcast setup
disk on the laptop while it was hardwired to the cable modem, thus not
connected to the rest of the then-still-existing DSL-based network.
Then, after getting the D-Link wireless card, I ran D-Link setup
software/driver install on the laptop.

This brings us up to date. Either the Comcast or the D-Link software
could be the culprit, or some combination of the two. I shudder to
consider attempting to get tech support from Comcast or D-Link, due to
the hours of "first prove to the phone rep that you're not a complete
idiot," not to mention "it must be the fault of some other part of
your network which we don't support" which that always entails.

It sounds like it could possibly be a power management problem and/or a
timing problem. Either the wireless adapter is getting turned off by
power management or the wireless network doesn't kick in quickly
enough. I don't think this has anything to do with Comcast. To check
the power management on the network card, look at its properties in
Device Manager and see if there is a power management tab. If so,
uncheck the box that says "allow Windows to turn off this device when
not in use".

Another way to handle this would be to set your backup software to wait
until you know all computers are on. For instance, on a small network
like yours I would suggest using SecondCopy (www.centered.com) and
simply set the copying time to when you know all three machines will be
on instead of mapping drives. There is no need to map drives unless you
are using specialized software running on a server that needs the
workstations to think it is really running locally.

Malke

 

[Bob Weissman]

Yes, I've narrowed it down to the wireless card and/or driver because
the problem doesn't occur when using a hard wire. It's gotta be a
timing thing. Every Windows startup-time program is yelling "me first!"
and somebody's gotta lose. I wish there were a finer-grained way of
specifying who gets to go first. I need the wireless connection to be
up before Windows tries to reconnect mapped drives.

I use the mapped drives for purposes other than backup. (I'm using the
Iomega auto backup program which came with my NAS drive, and it works
well.) I also use the mapped drives for Quicken, which after all these
years still needs them to see network drives, and in some of my own
batch scripts. So I wish I could find a way to get the wireless card to
start sooner.

Thanks,
- Bob

 

[Malke]

Yes, I've narrowed it down to the wireless card and/or driver because
the problem doesn't occur when using a hard wire. It's gotta be a
timing thing. Every Windows startup-time program is yelling "me
first!" and somebody's gotta lose. I wish there were a finer-grained
way of specifying who gets to go first. I need the wireless connection
to be up before Windows tries to reconnect mapped drives.

I use the mapped drives for purposes other than backup. (I'm using the
Iomega auto backup program which came with my NAS drive, and it works
well.) I also use the mapped drives for Quicken, which after all these
years still needs them to see network drives, and in some of my own
batch scripts. So I wish I could find a way to get the wireless card
to start sooner.

I've Googled around but I can't find anything to show how to make the
wireless driver start early enough. Maybe one of the networking gurus
in one of the wireless and/or networking groups can help. Here's a list
of all the MS newsgroups:
http://aumha.org/nntp.htm

Like you, I think the timing is the cause of the problem. Some
suggestions which may or may not be useful:

1. Assign the laptop a static IP address and set the gateway to the
router's address. Use the router's address for DNS. You can always use
the alternate configuration (setting it up as dynamic) for when you and
the laptop are not at home.

2. If you are using Windows to manage the wireless, use the wireless
adapter's software instead - or vice versa.

3. Try a different wireless adapter and use its drivers.

If you figure this out, I'd love to know if any of that worked.

Good luck,

Malke

 

[Bob Weissman]

I've Googled around but I can't find anything to show how to make the
wireless driver start early enough. Maybe one of the networking gurus
in one of the wireless and/or networking groups can help. Here's a list
of all the MS newsgroups:
http://aumha.org/nntp.htm

Like you, I think the timing is the cause of the problem. Some
suggestions which may or may not be useful:

1. Assign the laptop a static IP address and set the gateway to the
router's address. Use the router's address for DNS. You can always use
the alternate configuration (setting it up as dynamic) for when you and
the laptop are not at home.

2. If you are using Windows to manage the wireless, use the wireless
adapter's software instead - or vice versa.

3. Try a different wireless adapter and use its drivers.

If you figure this out, I'd love to know if any of that worked.

Good luck,

Malke

I'd already tried #3 with my old Linksys 'b' card, and it worked fine. I
guess this narrows it down to the D-Link driver being slow to start.

I tried #1 and #2 also; neither helped.

I did come up with a workaround. It's kind of annoying, but it solves
the problem: I added a password to my logon.

Because the driver starts at boot time, but the reconnecting doesn't
occur until logon, prompting for a logon password delays logon long
enough for the wireless connection to complete. I can tell by looking at
the LEDs on the D-Link wireless card whether it's connected. So I delay
logging on until then.

It's annoying to have to supply a password, but it's less annoying than
having to manually reconnect the drives every time.

I'll keep looking for a more elegant solution.

Thanks,
- Bob