Mapped Network Drive Won't Stay Connected

How connected?

Let me be more precise in this explanation. I am talking about a LAN connection with a mapped network drive that establishes a connection between client and server at boot. There are times that the connection between the client (my WindowsXP machine) fails to establish that connection on it's own with the network drive and I can see that when I look in Windows Explorer and it says "Disconnected Network Drive" beside the drives that have not established a connection. The drives that are connected say "Network Drive".  In order to establish that connection I can click on the drive and then it will show the files and folders on the drive. The connection should be established by WinXP at boot but that doesn't always happen. And I can tell that it hasn't when I attempt to open a file with Microsoft Excel or other applications and it takes longer to open the file. When the connection is already established the file will open quickly. 

I have a mapped network drive that will not stay connected on my WinXP Pro Inspiron 5100. After boot it will sometimes show that it is connected and other times it is not. I can click on the mapped drive when viewing the available drives in My Computer and it will connect and show the files/folders on the drive but after closing My Computer and going back later it will show that it's not connected. This causes problems when trying to open a file from a mapped drive with Excel or other programs when there is no connection because there is a lag time waiting for a new connection to be established.....usually 15 to 20 seconds. That does not sound like much time but when the connection is already there the file opens immediately.....and that does happen sometimes but not always.

If you are on a network,you have some kind of connection or not?

Maybe cable or wireless

We are having the same issue with our new Optiplex with WinXP Pro.  We leave our PC on all night but sometime over night, it disconnects from our LAN mapped drives on the network.  I cannot figure it out either.  Hopefully someone will let us know the fix.  This used to be an issue in XP Home and Microsoft told everyone that in order to stay connected, you had to upgrade to XP Pro...thanks Bill, it still does not correct the issue.

Joel

 Hi Joel

I was surprised when I got the New Message in my mail box about the mapped drive issue. I still have that problem with my Inspiron 5100. I guess it is more along the lines of an aggravation than anything else. I can click on the drive letter and see what's there but it should stay connected. I also have an OptiPlex but it hasn't shown the same problem. It has XP Pro as well as the Inspiron.

I guess this problem has not had enough people complaining about it!!

Jeff

Yeah, we tried a few things per Microsoft KB articles to no avail.  I just checked back here to see if any of the wise and fearless have developed a fix for this issue yet.  Seems we were fine until we installed SP2, then we uninstalled it and now it just loses connection sometime overnight to the server drives.

Joel

Just re-visiting this issue.  It now seems that we can reach the server with the aforementioned machine, but the new hard drive that was installed cannot be viewed if we leave it on overnight (as we normally do), and we have to restart the system in order to get that one drive back.  Any thoughts?  The other drives on the same server are fine in the morning.

 

Joel