Medica Center, give me access.

November 30, 2008 9:41 AM

I have an XP Windows Media Center PC that accesses two network drives called M: and N:. The problem is that media center can't access the drives unless I go into windows explorer and open the drives manually. How can I set it up so the drives are accessible immediately?

The PC works purely as a media center, which is why this is annoying; I don't want to have a mouse and keyboard connected to it, and I don't want to have to . But for whatever reason, Windows does not properly reconnect network drives until the user actually accesses the drive. Any suggestions?

posted by baggers to computers & internet (8 comments total)

The problem is that media center can't access the drives unless I go into windows explorer and open the drives manually.

That's not a bug, it's a feature.

At boo, the simplest workaround -- a batch file that runs "cd m: && dir && cd n: && dir"

There's also the windows autodisconnect issue. If you don't use a share for a certain amount of time, windows disconnects it. (grumble.) KB138365 has a workaround, but if you use the net command to fix it, it can mess with windows autotuning of file sharing. This won't be an issue if you don't share the drives on your media PC. If you do, use the direct registry entry method to change this to something reasonable (like, say, infinity)
posted by eriko at 10:01 AM on November 30, 2008

Is this an issue that only happens after a reboot? If so, you might just need to tell Windows to reconnect to the network shares automatically on boot/logon.

See here for instructions. I think if you already have the drives mapped, you can right-click on them, choose Properties, and check the necessary box.
posted by autojack at 11:06 AM on November 30, 2008

I have an XP media center box on the network: it finds mapped drives at startup without issue. Are the drives mapped?
posted by mandal at 11:42 AM on November 30, 2008

I have the drives mapped, and they are set to reconnect, so that's not it. After thinking about it further, I realized that this PC is on a wireless network, and the wireless does not reconnect until the end of the boot up process. This might not be helping, I think.
posted by baggers at 2:55 PM on November 30, 2008

mandal, is your network a wired one? I'm thinking that what is happening is that the wireless network is taking time to connect, and in the meantime, Windows does not reconnect the drives until I go in and access them myself. eriko's batch file would work if there is a way I could get that to run after the network is connected. Anybody know a way to do that?
posted by baggers at 7:33 PM on November 30, 2008

I have a similar "feature" with a wired network so I don't think you can blame the wireless network.
posted by rholly at 7:34 PM on November 30, 2008

@baggers - sorry for delayed response. I have about half a dozen machines on a mixed wired/wireless network. I don't have any issues accessing the networked drives with wired or wireless.

I guess you could try running through the electrical cable for a wired connection, though there's no guarantee that would help.

@ baggers & rholly - is it possible that the drives themselves are going into some low power state?
posted by mandal at 2:23 AM on December 1, 2008

Not sure what the ettiquette is on answering ones own question, but here's what I did that seemed to fix it...

1. Using regedit, delete entire key in the registry on XP machine

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explore
\MountPoints2

2. Reboot


After doing that, the drives reconnected normally at logon and seem to be working okay.

I think that Windows had somehow got its knickers in a twist over which drives were there and not, and this cleared out everything and forced it to reconnect the drives.
posted by baggers at 5:14 PM on December 4, 2008