Staff Share loses connection on laptops

[abillybob]

Hey Guys

 

Really hoping you can help me, I did call up county but that was a week ago and they still can't help me! Basically I have a file server which has the Staff's home drive, Pupil's home drive, Staff share and Pupil share on it. These are all mapped from my Domain Controller server using Group Policy. When teachers are using their laptops and the laptops go to sleep the laptops drop connection from the server for a few seconds and loose connection to all the mapped drives. Once the wifi reconnects itself they all reconnect again no problem. Except for the staff share which to enable to reconnect you must full restart your machine. I can't understand why this is really hoping you guys could shed some light on this as a lot of staff are getting annoyed about this!

 

Thanks

Alex

[DevilsAdvocate]

No idea how much difference this setting makes as I've always enabled it, but do you have the 'reconnect' setting checked on your staff share mapped drive?

 

[abillybob]

Hi Mate

 

Yeah I have checked that option and they all have it ticked. I have also checked the sharing properties and all drives have the same options ticked!! So strange :/

 

Alex

[DevilsAdvocate]

Do you get any kind of error message when attempting to connect to the staff share drive after you wake the laptop from sleep?

[abillybob]

Yeah, it just says Could not connect to B: Drive. No reason behind it because if you go onto run and type \\filecloud\staffshare it will reconnect to it again!

[Joanne]

I've found that sleeping machines cause all sorts of issues, so the power options are to turn off the display, but never sleep. Try applying that policy to the laptops, at least they will always retain their connection that way :-)

[jb2201]

I got around this by creating a small VB program that is installed on staff laptops, it checks if it can ping a domain server every 10 seconds, if it can and the drives are disconnected then it will re-map them. It seems pretty efficient, hardly touches the laptops resources but we are on new Macbooks here.

 

Alternatively if Staff are allowed to run VBS files, you could just create a small script which maps the drives back in and tell them to run it if they ever lose connection.

Edited December 9, 2013 by jb2201

[GeekyPete]

Try mapping the same share to a drive other than B:\. B: was originally reserved for removable drives (a second floppy!, showing my age). It certainly used to behave differently to c: and above. If I am honest, I don't think I have used b:\ for over 15 years so they may have changed things since Windows 95. Anyway, it's very easy to test. Map the second drive letter to the same share, if one works and the other doesn't sorted. If not then you've only lost 10 minute of time...

[abillybob]

Hi mate how can I set this in a policy?? I don't want to have to go round to every laptop as we're a school of 300 of the things!!!

I've found that sleeping machines cause all sorts of issues, so the power options are to turn off the display, but never sleep. Try applying that policy to the laptops, at least they will always retain their connection that way :-)

[abillybob]

Thanks mate great idea although staff here can't run VBS files or scripts!

I got around this by creating a small VB program that is installed on staff laptops, it checks if it can ping a domain server every 10 seconds, if it can and the drives are disconnected then it will re-map them. It seems pretty efficient, hardly touches the laptops resources but we are on new Macbooks here.

 

Alternatively if Staff are allowed to run VBS files, you could just create a small script which maps the drives back in and tell them to run it if they ever lose connection.

[abillybob]

I've checked with Drive letter viewer and nothing is using B: though I will give it a go see if it makes a difference

Try mapping the same share to a drive other than B:\. B: was originally reserved for removable drives (a second floppy!, showing my age). It certainly used to behave differently to c: and above. If I am honest, I don't think I have used b:\ for over 15 years so they may have changed things since Windows 95. Anyway, it's very easy to test. Map the second drive letter to the same share, if one works and the other doesn't sorted. If not then you've only lost 10 minute of time...

[Duke5A]

I've checked with Drive letter viewer and nothing is using B: though I will give it a go see if it makes a difference

 

Doesn't matter if anything is on that drive letter or not. @GeekyPete nailed it with it being reserved for floppy drives. Back in the day you could use it as a ghost drive for copying between floppy disks in a single floppy drive system. It's probably something legacy related when the machine comes out of sleep.

[Joanne]

Hi mate how can I set this in a policy?? I don't want to have to go round to every laptop as we're a school of 300 of the things!!!

 

It's User Configuration | Preferences | Control Panel Settings | Power Options (right click) > new > Power Plan

[GeekyPete]

But after you try any other drive than b: right....

[abillybob]

Hmm restarted the file server last night and don't seem to have had anyone come chase me down! Thanks for all your help though! I have had things that use the letter B: before now and I've never had an issue. Saying that I will change the drive letter if anything goes wrong and see what happens cheers guys

[Wonderburg]

It mite not actually be disconnecting. Sometimes Windows 7 displays it as Disconnected (Red X) but it actually connects if double click the shared drive. I have this problem with SIMS where the S drive shows as disconencted and SIMS 'cant connect to S: drive'. To fix this, I open the S: drive, close it, and viola. To fix this, I wrote this (42514c89ce17c0cc9756c10e04e71036.png) in GPO. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System is what goes off the screen.

 

Hope this helps,

 

- Wonderburg