Super Weird Home Network Issue

I am seeing something that for the life of me I cannot pinpoint a solution for. In this scenario, assume I have two PCs, both running Win 11 22H2. One is named GODZILLA and the other is HYSTERIA.

On Godzilla I attempt to map a network drive to a share on Hysteria using File Explorer. I get no errors; it acts as if it is connecting just fine. However, in File Explorer, I do not see the drive letter that I mapped. If I open a command prompt and type in the drive letter (for example, Y:) I get an error stating that "The system cannot find the drive specified".

Here is where it gets really weird:

If I now attempt to map another drive letter, and I choose to drop down the list of available drive letters, it shows the drive letter that I previously tried to map as being connected to the share! But I still cannot access it anywhere.









It gets even better...

If I open a command prompt and perform a "net use Y: \\hysteria\backups" it will successfully map Y: to the share AND I can access that share from the command line. However, I can ONLY access it from the command line. If I type in "Y:" in the address bar of File Explorer and hit ENTER, File Explorer reports that it cannot find Y: (same as in the last screenshot above).

But wait, there's more!

Any drive letter that I attempted to map from File Explorer are no longer available. In other words, if I attempt to map a drive again, the previously attempted drive letter shows as being used, but I cannot access it from anything. I also cannot disconnect it. For example, if I perform a "net use Y: /d" it will tell me that the network connection could not be found.

On the other hand, if I map the drive from the command line, then I can also disconnect the drive mapping from the command line, but not from File Explorer. Recall that the mapping does not even show up in File Explorer.

Summary

It almost looks like there is some sort of disconnect between GUI and command line. If I map a drive from the GUI, there are some parts of the GUI that recognize that the drive is mapped but the parts needed to allow me access have no clue that the drive is mapped and this includes the command line. On the other hand, if I map it from the command line, then I can access the drive from the command line, but not File Explorer. Here is an example of me connecting a share from the command line and navigating to it successfully from the command line, then finally disconnecting it. Again, bear in mind that no access via File Explorer is possible. In this example I use a different drive letter (R:) to avoid conflict with Y: that I tried to map earlier.



Things Tried

Verified that all my network settings appear to be properly configured.
Performed a network reset operation in Windows to reset net adapters to default settings.
Attempted Windows repair with DISM and SFC /ScanNow. No problems found.

Note: My network config is a little odd. I don't think that any of this comes into play, especially considering that this worked fine up until now, but I want to provide complete info.

My system has 3 network adapters:

1) Intel 2.5Gbps Ethernet
2) Realtek 2.5Gbps Ethernet
3) WiFi 6e Adapter

The WiFi adapter is disabled. It is only there as an emergency backup but never used.

The Realtek Ethernet adapter is devoted to Hyper-V VMs ONLY so that the VMs have an independent network adapter that does not need to be shared with the OS.

The physical machine uses only the Intel Ethernet adapter.

The timing here really stinks. I was planning on doing a clean install after 23H2 gets officially released (yes, I know it is only an enablement package, but I'm funny that way). Now I find myself in a situation where I likely will need to do a clean install now rather than wait for that release. This is one situation where I fear my backup strategy will fail me and a reinstall may be the only option.

Anyone have any thoughts or ideas?

Let me add one more note that I forgot: If I browse to a share, I can access that share just fine. I just simply cannot map a drive to it.

I don't try Mapping a computer/drive on a computer but a NAS drive attached to my Wireless Router using right-click of This PC in File Explorer and Map network drive on Win10 and Win11 or Windows Explorer on earlier Windows, 7 and XP. My needs are for simple file storage/access and can do it from any computer connected to the Router whether Wired or Wireless. My NAS drive is 2 x 2TB drives set as RAID 1 for total of 2TB storage.

Wouldn't it be worth seeing if a repair install would fix the issue before you jump into the looong process of a clean install.

Y

glasskuter said:

Wouldn't it be worth seeing if a repair install would fix the issue before you jump into the looong process of a clean install.

Click to expand...

You make a really good point. If nothing else, it sure would be interesting to see if that helps. Although, I have so many automated processes that it might actually be faster to do a clean install

@jimbo45 - a question for you: I know that you are a big fan of installing Windows using DISM. I was thinking of doing this to install a secondary installation of Windows to a VHDX and then natively booting from that just to see if a separate clan install of Windows would also be affected. I want to do this because I did perform an Intel Management Engine FW upgrade and a system BIOS upgrade about a week ago so I want to be sure that a clean install is even capable of working. It just dawned on me that I may not have mapped a drive since those updates.

Anyway, Jimbo, my question is this: When deploying using DISM, do you know if it is still possible to install Windows with a local account rather than with a Microsoft account or am I stuck installing with a Microsoft account?

hsehestedt said:

Y

You make a really good point. If nothing else, it sure would be interesting to see if that helps. Although, I have so many automated processes that it might actually be faster to do a clean install

@jimbo45 - a question for you: I know that you are a big fan of installing Windows using DISM. I was thinking of doing this to install a secondary installation of Windows to a VHDX and then natively booting from that just to see if a separate clan install of Windows would also be affected. I want to do this because I did perform an Intel Management Engine FW upgrade and a system BIOS upgrade about a week ago so I want to be sure that a clean install is even capable of working. It just dawned on me that I may not have mapped a drive since those updates.

Anyway, Jimbo, my question is this: When deploying using DISM, do you know if it is still possible to install Windows with a local account rather than with a Microsoft account or am I stuck installing with a Microsoft account?

Click to expand...

Hi there

Absolutely possible to install separate Windows to a vhdx file -- just create the vhdx file as a standard file anywhere on disk ( diskpart, list disk select disk, list vol select vol create vdisk file=x:\name.vhdx type=fixed maximum=xxxxx (in mb)
attach vdisk list disk select disk (the vdisk) create partition primary format = ntfs quick list vol assign letter=y.

exit diskpart now run your dism /Apply-Image to Y or whatever disk you've created

after that finishes you then need to install the boot loader. Install that to an efi partition you usually use to the one you boot your main windows from -- bcdboot.exe

then at boot you should see your new windows system in the menu along with your standard one. For example-



The local account is still possible -- at the sign in or create ms account simply se the following

account : nobody@nobody.com
password : anythingyoulike

Youll get a message oops something went wrong. Hit the Next button and it will continue with a local account.

Cheers
jimbo

reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v EnableLinkedConnections /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

Thanks, HDMI. Unfortunately, that wasn't related to the issue I was seeing.

In the meantime, I tried a "reset this PC". That did fix the networking problem but I ended up with no web browser installed (not even Edge). So, in the end I had no choice but to do a complete clean reinstall and I am now back up and running.

In hindsight, I think that there is another strategy that I could have used:

I could have restored an older Macrium Reflect backup, from say a week or two ago. That would have given me a working base copy of Windows WITH all my apps installed. Then, I could have mounted the most recent backup from yesterday and copied over all my data. So, by doing a two phased approach I could have had Windows with all my apps, and all my current documents from the newer backup.

I guess I may try that sometime simply as a test.

Idk how people have so much problems Map Networking A Drive. . lol

JAM83 said:

Idk how people have so much problems Map Networking A Drive. . lol

Click to expand...

I experiment with a lot of stuff on my systems. Often I do it on VMs, but there are some things you just want to do outside of a VM. This one was weird because it looked like it connected but then the mapped drive was not available.

In any case, it was a good recovery exercise, but I now have an even better plan for next time as I noted a few posts ago.

Unless I really need it to be a mapped drive for some reason that I can't avoid, I vastly prefer to use the Add Network Location for This PC type of approach. Once added, these items can be pinned to Home (former Quick Access, in File Explorer's nav pane) in such a particular way that pinning them in there does not force them to use the network to attempt to reconnect to their target path location. This can be especially useful e.g. in situations where it asks for credentials each time or where some of the network shares are temporarily unreachable, when you try to pin them to Home.

As an aside, this also works with the VBScripts that I wrote to export/import the pinned items to/from a simple textfile, and, this should also work even if you use these VBScripts to export/import the pinned items from different user accounts (at least if we can assume that these Network Location items under This PC are present for each different user account in question). These scripts also work with pinned mapped drives, though, but trying to import the pinned mapped drives can tend to be more cumbersome, or basically it depends.