Mapped drive show "unavailable" yet actually is available

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Mike Leone

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Aug 11, 2025, 3:31:05 PMAug 11
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Have I mentioned I hate Mondays? Oh, and developers ....

Anyways, my devs have a VM with a persistent drive mapping to a specific share. (og, and they insisted on setting "EnableLinkedConnections", so that they always see that same drive letter mapping even when they start an administrative command prompt.

Anyway, I had a heck of a time getting rid of the old drive mapping, I had to eventually reset EnableLinkedConnections, reboot, disconnect the drive, and do a "mountvol S: /d" to get the S: drive mapping to go away. (never had to use the mountvol command before ..)

Anyways, then I re-enabled EnableLinkedConnections, rebooted, did a "net use S: \\filesharepath" /persistenmt:yes", and it mapped to the right file share.

Oddly, it shows a red X in File Explorer, and net use says:

C:\Users\contentadmin>net use
New connections will be remembered.

Status       Local     Remote                    Network

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unavailable  S:        \\dc2_fileshare02\WCC_DEV Microsoft Windows Network
The command completed successfully.
Yet it's not unavailable. I can click on it, see all files, etc

C:\Users\contentadmin>s:

S:\>dir
 Volume in drive S is WCC_DEV
 Volume Serial Number is B4FE-65BC

 Directory of S:\

07/28/2023  12:00 PM    <DIR>          .
07/28/2023  12:00 PM    <DIR>          ..
02/08/2022  03:16 PM    <DIR>          ADF customization code
11/16/2022  10:53 AM    <DIR>          coulibs
11/28/2022  01:18 PM    <DIR>          Data Staging
08/06/2025  04:07 PM    <DIR>          dellev
12/11/2023  04:19 PM    <DIR>          dev3
07/29/2022  10:13 AM    <DIR>          FileShare
07/28/2023  12:25 PM    <DIR>          groupsMigrate
11/21/2022  03:43 PM    <DIR>          INSTALLS
07/16/2021  04:53 PM    <DIR>          INVOICES
12/16/2021  03:10 PM    <DIR>          Logs
10/04/2022  12:08 PM    <DIR>          Oracle
06/10/2021  02:34 PM    <DIR>          PURCHASE ORDERS
02/23/2023  12:58 PM    <DIR>          SD Code base
11/15/2022  05:26 PM    <DIR>          SD Code base old
06/14/2021  03:41 PM    <DIR>          soa_composites
01/26/2023  12:15 PM    <DIR>          Temp
05/06/2025  08:37 AM    <DIR>          Troubleshooting
12/08/2022  11:50 AM    <DIR>          UPDATE SD CODE BASE VD120822
02/02/2024  12:23 PM    <DIR>          WCC_DEV
               0 File(s)              0 bytes
              21 Dir(s)  182,281,498,624 bytes free

I'm inclined to mostly ignore it .... but lemme ask.

Why? LOL

Why does it think it's unavailable when it isn't? And how do I tell it that the drive *is* available?

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Mike. Leone, <mailto:tur...@mike-leone.com>

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Philip Elder

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Aug 11, 2025, 4:06:36 PMAug 11
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Now that it is made persistent log off and back on again and open Explorer. Does it show as connection established? A reboot may be needed too.

 

Philip Elder MCTS

Senior Technical Architect

Microsoft High Availability MVP

MPECS Inc.

E-mail: Phili...@mpecsinc.ca

Phone: +1 (780) 458-2028

Web: www.mpecsinc.com

Blog: blog.mpecsinc.com

Twitter: Twitter.com/MPECSInc

Teams: Phili...@MPECSInc.Cloud

 

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Melvin Backus

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Aug 11, 2025, 6:02:58 PMAug 11
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I've seen this for ages across multiple machines with mapped drives. My personal machine usually mapped 20+ drives across various servers and invariably there were 1 or 2 that wouldn't show active. They were always mapped as persistent and the issue was independent of the linked connections state.
The one thing that we consistently found was that after you navigate to it from explorer it would then show active. Sometimes that would be just clicking the drive in explorer but other times it required putting the unc path into the address bar.
I realize that does explain the why, but maybe it triggers something meaningful for someone.


Sent from my mobile. Autocorrupt enabled. Pls read what I meant, not what I sent.
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Subject: [External] RE: [ntsysadmin] Mapped drive show "unavailable" yet actually is available
 
Now that it is made persistent log off and back on again and open Explorer. Does it show as connection established? A reboot may be needed too. Philip Elder MCTS Senior Technical Architect Microsoft High Availability MVP [mvp. microsoft. com]
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Now that it is made persistent log off and back on again and open Explorer. Does it show as connection established? A reboot may be needed too.

 

Philip Elder MCTS

Senior Technical Architect

MPECS Inc.

E-mail: Phili...@mpecsinc.ca

Phone: +1 (780) 458-2028

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Mike Leone

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Aug 12, 2025, 3:53:38 PMAug 12
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On Mon, Aug 11, 2025 at 4:06 PM Philip Elder <Phili...@mpecsinc.ca> wrote:

Now that it is made persistent log off and back on again and open Explorer. Does it show as connection established?


No.
 

A reboot may be needed too.


And no.

Still actually connected, tho

LOL
 

Michael Leone

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Sep 8, 2025, 9:35:55 AMSep 8
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I realize this is very old at this point, but here is how I resolved that:

I made 2 Scheduled tasks - 1 to execute at startup, 1 to execute at
login. (overkill, but whatever). It executed this batch file:
(the idea is to map drive S:. the problems came when I tried to map it
somewhere else, it wouldn't change. it stayed there, showing
"inaccessible" yet was accessible).

MOUNTVOL S: /D
NET USE /PERSISTENT:NO
NET USE S: /DELETE
NET USE S: \\dc2_fileshare02\WCC_TST\Oracle /PERSISTENT:YES

And that resolved it. I hadn't heard of the MOUNTVOL command before.
And it may not be needed. But it isn't hurting, so I left it there
LOL.
I believe my problem before was that I was not issuing a "NET USE
/PERSISTENT:NO" to turn off persistence before deleting and
re-mapping.

Anyway, it may be ugly, but it worked, and my devs are quiet about it.
And that's what I live for - quiet users. LOL
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