Disconnected Network Drive

Every time I log into Windows XP Pro on my network, it shows that my mapped drives are disconnected. If I click on them then, they open ok, but sometimes, I will try and go into the mapped drive and it will tell me that it can't and that there is an error. I have absolute privileges and I have tried everything to remedy this. I seem to be the only one with this issue. I will be in the middle of working on a docuemnt from teh network drive and try and save and it will tell me that it can't. I have to save locally, log out of windows and then back in, and overwrite the original with my saved file. HELP!! It has been going on for a long time and I need to get this to stop. I thought that once you logged into the domain that it kept you logged in. Also, to give more info, I am on a domain with about 40 other computers, I am not going over my alloted licenses and the computer that I have as my PDC is a Windows 2000 Server and my file server is runnign Server 2003. It was added because we were running out of space on the PDC.

 

The best thing I can think of is the following. Note it is a command line option.

Net use \\computername\share /persistent:yes

Not sure if this is what ye are after.

 

Do you create your mapped drive through a server script with logon, or have you created it manually?

I experience a quite similar Problem on some of my Domain Clients.
But in my case, users can access the share (mapped drive) anyway, altough XP told them they can't, without any problems. (maybe a problem with their order of driver loading)
In your case:
As XP tells you that it couldn't reconnect your shares, I assume that they are created manually (no logon script)
In this case, it might be that your network card hardware settings show, that XP can turn the card off, because of power management issues.

Under Network connections, right click your active connection and go to Properties
(I translate this form german XP - hope you'll find it )
next to your Network cards name, hit "configure"
under "Energy settings" tab -> check if "Computer can turn of device, to save energy" is ticked or not.

Hope this helps ...

 

edit note:server refers to the server service that runs on both server and workstation os. to fix your problem run net config server on your workstation. this will tell the server service not to disconnect the drive. you can also double click the drive to "wake it up" before you try and save to it.


To change the default time-out period for the autodisconnect feature of the Server service, open a command prompt, type the following line, and then press ENTER
net config server /autodisconnect:number
where number is the number of minutes that you want the server to wait before it disconnects a mapped network drive. The maximum value for this command is 65,535.