Mapped network drive missing from My Computer and Explorer

On a Windows XP Pro SP3 machine one network drive refuses to show up in My Computer or Explorer. The missing drive letter is G: if that matters. Other mappings work fine. Other profiles one the same machine have no problem seeing G: I can access the G: just fine typing it into the address bar or in CMD shell.

I've used TweakUI to toggle hide/show G: with no difference. TweakUI says G: should be visible. I've logged off, on between toggles to make sure the settings are taking effect. I've looked at reg key [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer] and made sure it's zero'd. ref

We've limped along with this broken setup for some time, just working around it, but some applications do not allow typing in a path when choosing a place to save files and it's reached the point where it's intolerable.

So, anyone have any idea why XP won't show this drive letter? Or how to fix it?

Solution 1:

I had the same issue on Windows 7. At some point of excessive "try and error research" I recognized that when I started the command line as Administrator I couldn't see my mapped drive. When I started the command line as the user who mapped the drive... bingo there it was.

That went so far that I could connect a network share on say Z: for one user and some other share on Z: for another user....

I didn't know that mapping network drives was a user-specific thing to do... I'll do some more research on this and post it here, if I can come up with some explanations.

Solution 2:

Was trying to figure out the same thing only to discover later that (in my case) it was just hiding under the CD/DVD physical drive. Since I couldn't change the drive in command prompt (there was no CD inside the drive) and since the disk manager doesn't display on top pane the CD drives (it displays at the bottom) I didn't notice that my DVD drive took the missing letter. Changed, problem solved (for me) HTH