I remember seeing something like this but it was fixed in SP1. When this issue occur, if you run "dfsutil /pktflush" can you access the drive instantly then without having to wait 5 minutes? Blogging about Windows for IT pros at www.theexperienceblog.com

Andreas, thanks for your reply, I will try that and post the result as soon as the error pops up again.

Sometimes User on Windows 7 SP1 Enterprise Systems get a popup message "<Driveletter> inaccessible, network path not found" when trying to access a connected network drive in explorer. He is connected (via login script) to about 2 or 3 DFS Shares from the same DFS-Root. The error message is displayed when clicking on one of these drives. After ~5 minutes the drive is accessible again and only some folders of that drive are displayed (I am not sure if these are maybe recently used ones), after some more minutes all folders are displayed and can be accessed. On another Windows 7 system I am able to access the share without any problems during the whole period, so the share should be ok. A lot of Windows XP Workstations are using the same shares as well without having any problems. I checked the Windows System and Application Log of that client, no errors during the timeframe the problem occured. I also tried to map the same network drive with a different user as the problem occured, same problem. During the problem period I can connect to other shares (the DC\netlogon for example). I dont see any error messages in Application and System logs on the DFS Server during that timeframe. Because the problem is only occuring sometimes it is pretty hard to get aware of it. DFS Server is a Windows 2008 R2 Standard SP1 running Domain DFS in Windows 2000 Mode, DC is Windows Server 2008 Standard x32 Edition. Anybody ideas?

I remember seeing something like this but it was fixed in SP1. When this issue occur, if you run "dfsutil /pktflush" can you access the drive instantly then without having to wait 5 minutes? Blogging about Windows for IT pros at www.theexperienceblog.com

I tried dfsutil /pktflush but drives are still not accessible. We have more and more clients with that or a similar problem, on most clients the drives cannot be accessed until a reboot. I created for testing purposes a testlink in DFS named "share1test" pointing to the same target as "share1". When the error occurs users are still able to access the testlink "share1test" but not the original one "share1"....very strange I deleted "share1" DFS Link and recreated it with same target, same thing, when the error occurs still only "share1test" is accessible. After a reboot all shares are accessible again. I tried setting autodisconnect -1, same error. Still not good to reproduce because it is not on all clients Win7 Clients. XP Clients still dont have the problem. Maybe something with offline folder functionality, we use that for some shares. Although not for the ones that are ramdomly temporarily inaccessible.

There is a list of the latest hotfixes for DFS, both client and server, and before doing anything else I would patch both my clients (might want to test the hotfix on a few first) but also the server. Have a peak at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968429Blogging about Windows for IT pros at www.theexperienceblog.com