In Windows 7 and Vista mapped network drives will disconnect themselves after a time and show a red cross on the drive icon. You will still be able to click on the drive and see/use the contents but applications that require a network drive will see them as disconnected and will not see files.If you try to disconnect the drive it will still sit there saying ‘Disconnected Network Drive’ – the only solution is to reboot.
This is because there is a default disconnect time for inactive network connections. To correct this and turn the autodisconnect off do the following:
- Open the command prompt as Administrator – to do this either click Start\All Programs\Accessories and RIGHT click the Command Prompt icon then LEFT click Start as Administrator or type CMD into the search box and hold Control & Shift keys down then press enter.
- In the Command box type:net config server /autodisconnect:-1
and press return.
- Reboot computer.
Your mapped network drives should now stay connected – this is a permanent fix.
Also – when connecting mapped drives to Vista or Windows 7 – connect them with the full domain name of the server i.e. \\servername.domain.local\sharename NOT \\servername\sharename – Vista/Windows 7 insist on full domain paths in order to reconnect. You can connect using just servername but if it needs to reconnect it will not find the server.
