Cannot access network drive in PowerShell running as administrator

I'm running PowerShell in a Windows 7 x64 virtual machine. I have a shared folder on the host mapped as a network drive (Z:). When I run PS normally I can access that drive just fine, but if I run it "as administrator" it tells me:

Set-Location : Cannot find drive. A drive with the name 'Z' does not exist.
At line:1 char:13
+ Set-Location <<<<  Z:
    + CategoryInfo          : ObjectNotFound: (Z:String) [Set-Location], DriveNotFoundException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : DriveNotFound,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.SetLocationCommand

How do I access network drives as administrator?

Solution 1:

In the end the fix was simply to re-map the drive letter while running as Administrator:

net use Z: "\\vmware-host\Shared Folders"

It doesn't have to be done from the same PowerShell instance (or from PowerShell at all) - it's just something that needs to be done once for the entire logon session.

Solution 2:

In my case, I was able to simply use the UNC path instead of the drive mapping and it worked fine.

So, per your example, instead of using the mapped drive Z:\, I just used "\\vmware-host\Shared Folder" as the path.