[zanyzach37]

Hey everyone,

My name is Zach and I'm new here. I started working in an office with a network that runs on Windows XP and has several external and internal harddrives on a network that are shared between three desktop computers and one laptop computer (that is usually plugged in and removed daily). Everything else is stable.

For whatever reason, I frequently can't access two drives, and they either appear as "Disconnected Network Drives" on one computer (they're the M: and N: drives) and on another, on a restart they show up, but when you try to access them you get an error message and then they disappear from "My Network Places".

I've rebooted all of the computers in the system, and plugged/unplugged the network cables everywhere there was a connection. I'm sort of lost as to what to do, and I've read things about editing the registry to make the drives appear, but if there were another solution, I'd prefer it, as it's not my computer and I don't want to make any permanent changes if need be - just something to fix the current problem of not being able to access those drives.

Thanks so much in advance for your help, and I look forward to your responses.

Best,

Zach

 

[lgephard]

Have you given each of these network devices a static ip address or are you requesting that the system assign an ip? Although assigned ip's are generally constant, you need to be assured this is so by assigning them for each device.

A mapped drive will not be accessible if its assigned ip is constantly changing. Doing this should have no impact on your linking to the Internet, but you should remember that the router will also have an ip address, typically 192.169.1.1

 

[johnwill]

Can you tell us exactly what make/model these external drives are? Are these USB disks or NAS (Network Attached Storage) Ethernet disks?

I can't imagine editing the registry to make the drives appear, but we need to know what kind of hardware we're dealing with.