Networked Drive not Auto reconnecting ay logon

[JDRick]

I have an XP Laptop that is used to record video for our high school football team. When we are donw using the video on the laptop we store it on a TerraStation 2TB server in the office. It is always on and connected to a hub that the laptop is hooked to when on.

My problem is this.... when the laptop is turned on, the network drive I set up shows "disconnected", and consequently, the application for transferring the video to the server doesn't show the network drive to select... after I click on the network drive in "my computer", the application will then see the network drive.

My question is how to make this automatically connect when the computer boots. I set it up to "reconnect at logon", but it does not without me opening the drive 1st...

Thanks for your help in advance!

Rick

 

[pklammer]

Reconnect at Logon not working

Me, too; I have XP Pro SP2 with automatic updates on 5 systems, and just this one fails: after most reboots, if I launch an application that was last working on a file in the mapped network drive, it comes up "unavailable" or "file not found" unless I visit Windows Explorer first.

I even tried putting batch files with shortcuts "n:\dummy.txt" and "m:\dummy.txt" in my Startup group, to force references to my M: and N: drives, and that isn't even enough!

No domains, just workgroup peer networking here. Like I say, works on all my other systems, has for years, just my latest Gateway Profile 6 acts different.

 

[Nodsu]

What if you put the drive mapping command in your startup?
Something like "net use X: \\server\share /user:domain\user /persistent:yes /savecred"

It may ask you the password the first time, but after that it should be remembered.


The problem may be that Windows starts up before the network is completely initialised. Eg DHCP is still waiting for an IP when Windows tries to reestablish the connection to the share.

What happens when you wait a minute or two before logging in?

 

[pklammer]

> What happens when you wait a minute or two before logging in?

Now, there's a clue! My other systems are multi-user, with auto-login. The problematic system is single-user -- that is, it doesn't have multiple users defined -- and it's also the fastest system. Maybe I'll try a batch job from the Startup group which will do a delay and then launch Windows Explorer pointing at the root of the mapped drive.

I also wonder if I have a USB "thumbdrive" mass-storage driver lurking somewhere, which has a "weak" claim on my M: and N: drive letters, but which can be overridden by Windows Explorer later in the startup sequence when it figures out there is no USB fob present. How might I look for evidence of that? Is "N:" going to appear in the registry? I might try unmapping the shared drive, and then see if any underlying N: appears at the next reboot. I could visit devmgmt.msc (Device Manager) with "Show Hidden" checked, but I don't think drive letters appear there.

 

[mikescorpio81]

on each PC, run a simple login script with the following lines:

net use S: /d /y
net use S: \\servername\share

You could also put a "net time \\servername" line in there too.
I think you are having problems re-connecting to the server share each time because you may not be authenticating correctly.

If you put this login script into the clients startup folder it should sort it out.