Mapped Drive will not connect after reboot

I think the path should be

 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>SOFTWARE>Microsoft>Windows>CurrentVersion>Policies>System.

This seemed to work for me so far

Geoff, after much research, this worked for me. Correction, it did for a little while - see last line. Sigh

You need to allow anonymous access to your shares on the NAS.

Use gpedit to edit your local policy:

Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > Security Options

Network security: Restrict NTLM: Outgoing NTLM traffic to remote servers

Set to Allow All

Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Network > Lanman Workstation.

Set Enable insecure guest logons to Enable.

Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings> Local Policies > Security Options

Double-click Microsoft network client: Digitally sign communications (always) and set it to Disabled. Click OK.

I also went into properties for the workstations ethernet interface, selected Internet Protocol V4 properties, Advanced, and set Enable Netbios Over TCP/IP  to on.

Bad news edit: I was happily accessing the NAS shares finally, then I shutdown File Explorer and tried to access the mapped shares again. Timed out with reconnection error. OMG! I rebooted the workstation and tried to access the mapped drives in File Explorer - it worked. Shutdown File Explorer and retried. Timed out with reconnection error. What?

The old NAS is a D-Link DNS-345, which I bought in January 2012.

The new NAS is a Synology DS1821+.

I'll se how long the Synology will stay connected...
The SMB might be a way to the answer, as I had tick off SMB1, on my sons computer in order for it to connect to the old NAS, after it had been shut down for a longer period of time. I have not tried to connect to the new NAS on that computer yet, and I have not found anything concretete in regards to the SMB.

Geoff, sorry to say that I'm burnt by the same issue. I'm still searching for a solution also.

My problem started around the week of 18/1/2021, and as I've made no changes to my home network I have to assume that a Windows update was applied in the background around then. Symptom is that File Explorer takes a long time to look around on start-up, and I can no longer connect to mapped drives (to my Netgear NAS) but I can open local drives.

I tried numerous things, after checking nbtstat, arp and ipconfig data, including clearing all internal caches I can find. I can ping the NAS by both it's IP address and name fine, but clicking on the mapped drive I now receive (eventually) an error stating either that the drive mapping is in use or that the path can't be found. Trying to open the NAS (under Network) in the left pane of File Explorer no longer shows the shares on the NAS - File Explorer just times out saying it can't access \<nas>.

I've also tried listing the fixed IP address of the NAS with its name in the hosts file, with no success.

And I can't even reload key Windows system files on my laptop as the "reset PC" option doesn't work either - it keeps failing without further information.

Interesting to note that I have a NVidia Shield media streamer on my network, and it can access the same drives on my NAS via SMB (SMB 2 or 3, not 1) to play content from there. It's clearly an issue isolated with the Windows PC, and not the NAS nor the local network.

I'll keep watching this thread, but I've run out of things I can think of trying sort of re-installing Windows - and I reeeeeally don't want to do that.

Thanks John,

I had thought about maybe trying a batch file to "remap" the NAS drives at every reboot. However, having not done batch files since DOS days, I didn't know how to proceed. I will certainly try yours, adjusted for my system. But first, how did you arrive at the IP addresses for each network drive? The 192.168 part is clear to me; but how one determines the other two parts isn't. Is it arbitrary, or is there some process to suss out just what they need to be?

Hi Rab,

I use a couple of tools, one is Buffalo's NASNavigator which gives the IP addresses, and I have a MAC address database in EXCEL which I maintain to map known entities.

With the MAC address (which is  the hardware ID of a device's network card) I can map that to the DNS data from my home router. I did this in self defense a few years ago when I noticed that there were unnamed machines on my network. Turns out, they were all legitimate but my Canon printer, for example, doesn't have a name in the DNS tables on my router. I know when I see b8:3e:59:d9:99:1b, OK, that's the printer, no worries.

Anyway, the devices, due to DNS leasing, can change IP addresses. So, I also keep the NAS drive IP addresses static in my router setup, for that, you need the MAC address. Once it is setup, most routers can remember that unless you do a factory reset.

For some reason, using the device or server names (like BUFF2/public) wasn't as reliable as the IP, not sure why WINDOWS gets so easily confused, my LINUX boxes don't.

Cheers,

John

PS - I hope the part about DNS leases helps you setup your environment so you can use the IP addressing for the bat files.