Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of turnkeysol
turnkeysol

asked on

Why do my drive mappings disappear?

I am running a Windows Server 2003 domain on a large 600+ workstation network.  Just recently I have been getting complaints from random users around the campus that when they log on in the morning all of their drive mappings are there and functional.  When they leave their workstations and come back some time later, some of their drive mappings are completely gone.

Here is some back information that might help.

1)  There is only one login script running and it maps the drives as persistent.
2)  There are no virus or spyware detected on the network.
3)  There have been no recent network infrastructure changes.
4)  The problem is not isolated to just one part of the campus. It's completely random.
5)  There is nothing in group policy that runs any sort of script after the login script.
6)  The login script is not calling any other script.
7)  DNS has been tested and is running fine.

I have noticed that a couple of the users that reported the issue had lost network connectivity at the time the issue was reported.  However, it is my understanding that even if network connectivity was lost, the drive letter would still be there being it was mapped as persistent.

If anyone has any ideas or has encountered this issue before, I would appreciate the help.


ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of roue461
roue461

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Avatar of turnkeysol
turnkeysol

ASKER

Thanks.  I will investigate the solution in more detail.  It does seem the the workstations in question are all GX270s.  Thanks for the tip
Ahh yeah those GX270's are junk. I can't wait until the last of them goes out of warranty and are replaced here.

We tried updating the drivers and even replacing the NIC's but that did not resolve the issue.

Dell even came and replaced the system board and power supply on every GX270 we have ( Which was around 250 out of 1500 workstations at the time) for an unrelated issue.

Until the replacement cycle gets rid of them we just have those users set to 100/Full, which causes more negotiations for their connection but at least they don't drop all there drives any longer.

Good luck!
Hi,
May I suggest that you set the switch port for those PC to 100/Full too so there will be no negociation at all and you know that it is correct (so no errors)

Just a suggestion :-)
To netnounours,

I agree with you! But I am not in charge of infrastructure here and the people who are want them all set to auto/auto. They don't want to manage the switches at a one port level. (we have a LOT of devices)

It's ok for now we have a pretty aggresive replacement cycle for our PC's and most of the GX 270's will be gone before the end of the year.  :)
I have changed the duplex settings on the computers in question.  The interesting thing is that some of the computers were not GX270's.  With that said the majority of the computers had Intel Pro NICs.  I have monitored the the situation and it seems that this just might have solved my problem.  I want to continue to monitor the situation, but I will go ahead and submit this ticket as closed and resolved.

Thanks!
Glad I could help!
Possibly related solution.  I had a more recent dell tower in which this happened and the solution was to unplug it before a reboot thus getting rid of the parasite power.