Loss of mapped drive, networked drive disconnects
I'm running Win7 ult x64. I am running on a network with 4 pcs, 2 vista, 2 xp. We have one server running 2000. I have mapped a couple of folders on the server and can connect just fine when I first start my pc. But after awhile the connection is lost. It still shows the drives, but not the connection. This internet works fine and access is controlled through the server. I can restart my machine and the drives will be connected and working as they should. But after some time they will disconnect again. Win 7 is acting like it is losing the connection to the network, because I can't map another drive from one of the other PC's unless I reboot. But the internet access is still working fine. Any ideas?
January 30th, 2010 12:38am

This behavior is caused by the default policy setting in the Windows Server. Mapped Drive Connection to Network Share May Be Losthttp://support.microsoft.com/kb/297684 Sometimes firewall can also cause this kind of issues. I suggest you temporary disable the firewall on both computers. After doing these, the mapped drives should not disconnect. In general situations, although the connections disconnect after a while, it should be able to reconnect if you launch it. In this case you may need to change the NTLM authentication level. Please refer the following website. Network security: LAN Manager authentication level The policy is: Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\Security Options\Network security: LAN Manager authentication level Please change “Send LM & NTLM - use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated”. If your system is Windows 7 Home Premium, you may change it from Registry. 1. Launch regedit from Start Search box.2. Find the following branch. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa 3. Create a DWORD key under Lsa and set: Name: LmCompatibilityLevel Value: 1 4. Restart.Arthur Xie - MSFT
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February 8th, 2010 8:50am

Do you know if this is an issue with server 2008 R2? We will be moving over in a month or two and just wondering if I should expect similar issues. edit: and thanks for the above post. It worked great. As soon as I changed the autodisconnect time it recognized the drives immediately and is working great.
February 10th, 2010 11:13pm

I have a similar situation. In my case, I have several users on Windows 7 pro but only one has issues with a mapped drive disappearing. He indicated that it happens mostly when logging on but occasionally during the day. More so, he experiences most of the disappearances using a VPN. We suspected the VPN at first, of course, but after getting the same behavior on the LAN we had to re-think it. Under Windows XP the user did just fine but once we moved him over to Win 7 it changed. At one time I tried your suggestion "Please change “Send LM & NTLM - use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated” but that did not work in our case. Any other suggestions? Thanks for your time. The affected mapped drive path goes to a SAN with VMWare 2008 Enterprise server. Firewalls are off on both ends
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May 5th, 2010 5:36pm

I am having same trouble with only windows 7 professional workstations. They are having the mapped drives shade out and the only thing that gets them reconnected is restarted the computer. We even have the policy client side extensions GPO in place on a 2008 DC for mapped drives instead of using login scripts. We do have some 2003 DCs active, however the file shares reside on a 2008 file server where the mappings occur. Anyone come up with a solution to this one? Also, this is also a SAN and all servers are VMs on VMWare.
May 21st, 2010 8:34pm

I have a similar problem on a home network where my Win 7 Pro 64 bit machine loses access to a Win XP box which is being used as a file server. Very frustrating & only fixed by a reboot. I've applied the fixes in the posts above & will post if the problem recurs.
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June 14th, 2010 8:15pm

No luck - still losing access to local shares.
June 15th, 2010 10:29pm

I 've got a network with one Win 7 machine and the other XP. The XP machine is password protected, the Win 7 machine is not. Problem: Drive mappings on the Win 7 machine are lost at every reboot. Fix: I added a password to the Win 7 machine, and the drive mappings are retained. Mirabile dictu! It's repeatable: remove the password from the Win 7 machine, and mappings are lost. Reinstate the password, and the mappings are retained. I've tried every fix I could find on the net, and this is the only thing I've found that works for me.
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June 23rd, 2010 9:16pm

To All, Here is what I have found. This is a problem with Windows 7 and nothing else. After several test and looking at forum after forum. here is what I came up with. I have 3 machines. 1 (XP) and 2(Windows 7 recently loaded). the 2 machines that I loaded Windows 7 (fresh) were both XP. The 1 XP machine that is still XP for this post I will call File_Machine (because this is where I hold my files and map to from the other machines. 1. When my other 2 machines were loaded with XP I have no problem with mapped drives. No dropping or reconnection problems. 2. I load Windows 7 on 1 of my machines and start noticing when I would shutdown or logoff it woudl hang at the log off screen and the only way to shutdown is a hard shutdown. I knew it was related to a network connections not closing or something but could not isolate it. 3. Installed Windows 7 one the other machine (oohh by the way 1 is Windows 7 Ultimate and the other is Professional). I started experiencing the same problems with this machine mapping back the my File_Machine. 4. Saw a post referencing the idle network connection disconnect feature in the Windows Operating system.. so I looked at my XP machine (File_machine) active sessions. 5. I brought both windows 7 machine online and let them restore the network connections to the XP box. after being idle for a while the sessions dropped because they were idle (this is normal and by default). ok fine.. no problems there. 6. here is the kicker.. when I went back to either Windows 7 machine and clicked on the mapped drive, it hung and would not reconnect to the share. the share is fine and active. The problem is the Windows 7 is not sending the correct signal to the system housing the share to reconnect. 7. To confirm this I ran the following command on the XP (File_machine).. NET CONFIG SERVER /AUTODISCONNECT:-1 (this command disabled the autodisconnect feature in a network connection is idle).. the (-1) represents the duration to wait before disconnecting. -1 is to disable.. I believe the number range is from 0 to 655555 or something.. representing seconds. 8. after the was disabled there were no more dropped connections. 9. set the number to 1 and tested again.. and the problem came back.. What does this say.. Microsoft needs to look at Windows 7 reconnection attempt commands for idle connection and see what signal is being sent to the resource to say wake up and reconnect me because it's not working.. Hopes this helps everyone and Hope MS reads this and looks into it.. You know have the info on how to recreate the problem.
July 7th, 2010 6:46am

To All, Here is what I have found. This is a problem with Windows 7 and nothing else. After several test and looking at forum after forum. here is what I came up with. I have 3 machines. 1 (XP) and 2(Windows 7 recently loaded). the 2 machines that I loaded Windows 7 (fresh) were both XP. The 1 XP machine that is still XP for this post I will call File_Machine (because this is where I hold my files and map to from the other machines. 1. When my other 2 machines were loaded with XP I have no problem with mapped drives. No dropping or reconnection problems. 2. I load Windows 7 on 1 of my machines and start noticing when I would shutdown or logoff it woudl hang at the log off screen and the only way to shutdown is a hard shutdown. I knew it was related to a network connections not closing or something but could not isolate it. 3. Installed Windows 7 one the other machine (oohh by the way 1 is Windows 7 Ultimate and the other is Professional). I started experiencing the same problems with this machine mapping back the my File_Machine. 4. Saw a post referencing the idle network connection disconnect feature in the Windows Operating system.. so I looked at my XP machine (File_machine) active sessions. 5. I brought both windows 7 machine online and let them restore the network connections to the XP box. after being idle for a while the sessions dropped because they were idle (this is normal and by default). ok fine.. no problems there. 6. here is the kicker.. when I went back to either Windows 7 machine and clicked on the mapped drive, it hung and would not reconnect to the share. the share is fine and active. The problem is the Windows 7 is not sending the correct signal to the system housing the share to reconnect. 7. To confirm this I ran the following command on the XP (File_machine).. NET CONFIG SERVER /AUTODISCONNECT:-1 (this command disabled the autodisconnect feature in a network connection is idle).. the (-1) represents the duration to wait before disconnecting. -1 is to disable.. I believe the number range is from 0 to 655555 or something.. representing seconds. 8. after the was disabled there were no more dropped connections. 9. set the number to 1 and tested again.. and the problem came back.. What does this say.. Microsoft needs to look at Windows 7 reconnection attempt commands for idle connection and see what signal is being sent to the resource to say wake up and reconnect me because it's not working.. Hopes this helps everyone and Hope MS reads this and looks into it.. You know have the info on how to recreate the problem. Hi What_I_Found, What is the default value for NET CONFIG SERVER /AUTODISCONNECT:-1 command ? As I would like to test and see if this command works for me and if it doesn't then I would like to go back to using the default value. Thanks in advance, Bashy
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January 21st, 2011 11:04am

I was having the same problem on my Win7 laptop (Enterprise version). Public drives were being dropped a number of times each day, and the only way I could reconnect them was to launch Run and enter the IP address of the server. Clicking the drive didn't reconnect. I couldn't find any menu option for "Reconnect" (Lots of "Disconnect"s though, except I was already disconnected!) I seem to have found a solution that doesn't require command prompts or registry edits. My drive hasn't dropped in three days. Under Control Panel > System and Security > Administrative Tools > Local Security Policy is a setting called "Microsoft Network Server:Amount of idle time required before suspending a session". Setting it to 99999 resolved my problem. I tested out the regedit and command prompt options, the Local Security Policy settings changed to match the same result as using the Control Panel each and everytime.
February 12th, 2011 7:39pm

To All, Here is what I have found. This is a problem with Windows 7 and nothing else. After several test and looking at forum after forum. here is what I came up with. I have 3 machines. 1 (XP) and 2(Windows 7 recently loaded). the 2 machines that I loaded Windows 7 (fresh) were both XP. The 1 XP machine that is still XP for this post I will call File_Machine (because this is where I hold my files and map to from the other machines. 1. When my other 2 machines were loaded with XP I have no problem with mapped drives. No dropping or reconnection problems. 2. I load Windows 7 on 1 of my machines and start noticing when I would shutdown or logoff it woudl hang at the log off screen and the only way to shutdown is a hard shutdown. I knew it was related to a network connections not closing or something but could not isolate it. 3. Installed Windows 7 one the other machine (oohh by the way 1 is Windows 7 Ultimate and the other is Professional). I started experiencing the same problems with this machine mapping back the my File_Machine. 4. Saw a post referencing the idle network connection disconnect feature in the Windows Operating system.. so I looked at my XP machine (File_machine) active sessions. 5. I brought both windows 7 machine online and let them restore the network connections to the XP box. after being idle for a while the sessions dropped because they were idle (this is normal and by default). ok fine.. no problems there. 6. here is the kicker.. when I went back to either Windows 7 machine and clicked on the mapped drive, it hung and would not reconnect to the share. the share is fine and active. The problem is the Windows 7 is not sending the correct signal to the system housing the share to reconnect. 7. To confirm this I ran the following command on the XP (File_machine).. NET CONFIG SERVER /AUTODISCONNECT:-1 (this command disabled the autodisconnect feature in a network connection is idle).. the (-1) represents the duration to wait before disconnecting. -1 is to disable.. I believe the number range is from 0 to 655555 or something.. representing seconds. 8. after the was disabled there were no more dropped connections. 9. set the number to 1 and tested again.. and the problem came back.. What does this say.. Microsoft needs to look at Windows 7 reconnection attempt commands for idle connection and see what signal is being sent to the resource to say wake up and reconnect me because it's not working.. Hopes this helps everyone and Hope MS reads this and looks into it.. You know have the info on how to recreate the problem. Hi What_I_Found, What is the default value for NET CONFIG SERVER /AUTODISCONNECT:-1 command ? As I would like to test and see if this command works for me and if it doesn't then I would like to go back to using the default value. Thanks in advance, Bashy I found the answer, and all of the above info here... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297684 The default "Disconnect setting" is set to 15 minutes.
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May 18th, 2011 8:15pm

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