A Lesson in Drive Mapping....

Problem: A user couldn't access the files on her network share, which was mapped to her E: drive. At first look, it appeared to be a very odd situation. I opened the network drive but didn't see any of the expected files or folders. What I did see was about a dozen shortcuts to locations on her C: drive. She said that these were created when she dragged and dropped folders onto the E: drive. A closer look showed that the E: drive window appeared to be a writeable CD window (????). I went to the Disk Management console and found that, sure enough, the CD drive was designated "E:".

Solution: I changed the CD drive letter to D: (as it should have been). Then I disconnected and remapped the network drive as E:. It took a reboot to finish up, but she was then able to get to her normal files and folders on her network share.

Lesson: The user must have booted one time with another drive attached (maybe a flash drive?), which must have used D:, and pushed the CD drive down to letter E:. Then when the logon script attempted to also use E:, the mapping got corrupted. Moral: When scripting network shares, use letters that are farther down the alphabet, leaving room for the occasional removable device.

Disappearing Act

Problem: Occasionally, when working on new laptops with both wireless and wired NICs, the wired LAN Connection disappears. It seems to only happen when I switch to the wireless connection. Unfortunately, when I want to switch back to the wire, I can't connect to the network. So far the wired LAN Connection always comes back after a reboot. I hope this isn't some nifty new "feature" I didn't know about. If so, I don't like it!!

Solution: ??