Mapped drives suddenly disappear and not auto mapping, but manually is fine

James Edmonds 811 Reputation points
2022-01-21T14:14:14.213+00:00

Hi,

We've had a number of users who have started to report that their main mapped drive to our central file share disappears from their profile.

Restarting, signing out and back in, and gpupdate fail to remap the drive and there are no errors in event viewer indicating any issue.
Gpresult shows it should be successfully applying without error.

If I get the users to manually map the drive, it firstly says S is already mapped to that share, but when completing the process and accepting the warning that S is already mapped, it succeeds and shows back up in Windows Explorer.

Can anyone offer any thoughts or input as to why the mapped drive may have suddenly started exhibiting this behaviour, and how to further diagnose, given that the manual mapping works perfectly?

Thanks
James

Windows 10
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3 answers

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  1. Philippe Levesque 5,681 Reputation points MVP
    2022-01-21T15:15:42.353+00:00

    Hi

    Do you map your drive via GPP ? Please try in replace mode, and click the restore option. Make sure Run in logged-on user’s security context (user policy option) is clicked too.

  2. Limitless Technology 39,336 Reputation points
    2022-01-21T22:05:30.32+00:00

    Hello @James Edmonds

    It is a very common scenario when the network is not yet ready to connect and successfully map the drive, but it is already configured for the system. Thus saying that it is already mapped, and when retrying, it appears.

    Enable the policy: "Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon" located under Computer Configuration -- Policies -- Administrative Templates -- System -- Logon. This might resolve your drive mapping issue.

    Hope this helps with your query,

    ----------

    --If the reply is helpful, please Upvote and Accept as answer--

  3. Gary Nebbett 5,721 Reputation points
    2022-02-01T09:45:15.18+00:00

    Hello James,

    I have investigated a similar problem in the past (I wrote about it at https://gary-nebbett.blogspot.com/2021/06/mapped-network-drive-reconnection.html). The work involved in understanding the behaviour might be disproportionate to the potential benefits (few users impacted, infrequent problem that can be overcome with some effort).

    My first question would be: are Offline Files (also known as Client-Side Caching or CSC) configured/used on the share?

    The troubleshooting approach would be to use Event Tracing for Windows to capture the behaviour. Ideally, one would capture the problem as it happened (if it was easily reproducible), but capturing what happens once the problem has occurred (during the remedial steps (remapping the drive letter)) might give a few hints.

    Gary