Win 7 and network drives

wolvers · 15 Apr 2010 at 23:28

Hi, I wonder if someone can help. I've noticed that on both of my Win7 machines, during boot up, they will try to connect to the network drives before the network connection has been initialized. This results in a warning about them drives not being connected at every boot up.

Does anyone know of a work around for this? Can I change the order of these things happening at boot or something?

I surprised that MS has missed this to be honest. :rolleyes:

Thanks

wolvers · 17 Apr 2010 at 09:12

Anyone?

Destination · 17 Apr 2010 at 09:20

No idea, I don't think i am getting this, certainly no error messages on boot with relation to network drives.

What way is your network setup?

wolvers · 17 Apr 2010 at 09:33

It's just a NAS attached to the router. It works perfectly except on startup windows tries to connect to the mapped drive before it's initialized the network connection.

Raumarik · 17 Apr 2010 at 10:01

You could remove the mappings and simply use shortcuts to the network locations instead.

So if P drive pointed to \\mynas\documents
make a shortcut pointing to \\mynas\documents

etc.

I know some network cards have settings that tells windows to wait for it initialising before attempting to authenticate, not sure about drive mappings though. I wouldn't have thought so.

Alternatively how about making a batch file to map for you?

net use P: \\mynas\mydocuments /persistent:No

Dewotter · 17 Apr 2010 at 10:21

There is a group policy setting accessible in Pro/Ent/Ult which will let you force Windows to wait until the network has fully loaded before allowing you to login.

Start>Run> gpedit.msc

Enable the following.

Computer Configuration>Administrative Templates>System>Logon> Always wait for the network at computer startup and login.

wolvers · 19 Apr 2010 at 14:35

No gpedit.msc in the premium version though. I guess I'd better see if I can find the reg key for that particular setting.

Edit; a quick google search found this

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms815238.aspx

Can't see the 'Always wait for the network at computer startup and login' option though.

wolvers · 28 Jul 2010 at 21:12

Wow, I can't believe that it's taken me this long to fix this!

Anyway, it turned out to be a problem with Windows firewall. I disabled it and the problem went away. I thought that I had sorted it by allowing the netlogon service but the problem came back a few days later, even though it fixed the same problem on my laptop and that is still working fine.

Now the only way to prevent this issue is to disable the firewall on the public profile, which is totally odd as my network connection is set as a private (home) one. :confused:

I also found this in the help docs.

Each network adapter is assigned the firewall profile that matches the detected network type.

If anyone has any idea what's going on I would really appreciate the input. Thanks.