Drive not showing in File Explorer after "net use" command

Question

I am running Windows 8 64bit and running Hyper-V VM's. On my host machine I want to map a drive to the VM using the following command.

net use * \\10.10.18.104\c$
Drive Y: is now connected to \\10.10.18.104\c$.

When I look in File Explore I don't see a Y: drive.

However, in the command window I can change directories using these commands.

Y:
dir

and all the files are displayed. Why does this not show up in File Explorer?

This seems to be intermittent as some days the drive does show up in File Explorer.

Thanks for the help

Answer 1

I'm going to venture a guess that you're running the command prompt as another user or as "Administrator" and you have UAC enabled. When this happens, you've mapped the drive under a different user context than the one your Explorer window is running in. Launch a command prompt without doing Run As Administrator or Run As a Different User and you should be fine.

Answer 2

Try to mount network drive with system priveleges:

1. Download PSTools from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/psexec, unpack it.

2. From PSTools folder via CMD (started as admin) execute psexec -i -s cmd.exe, accept agreement (or execute psexec -accepteula -i -s cmd.exe to skip agreement).

3. In popped-up CMD's window execute whoami to check that you are now identified as nt authority\system.

4. In that window execute your net use command like net use z: \\123.111.111.111\my_share /persistent:yes

If you got System error 58, try to execute command with specifying user/password in quotes like:

net use z: \\123.111.111.111\my_share /persistent:yes /user:"your username" "your password"

If in the future you will need to disconnect that network drive, perform step 2, then execute net use z: /delete. Or just reboot OS.

Also you can try to modify the registry: in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System create a DWORD entry named EnableLinkedConnections with a value of 1. Reboot the computer. Network drives mapped by the same user, even under different security contexts, will appear to programs running as that user.

Answer 3

Turn on Network Discovery. This can be done by opening "Network and Sharing Center", then click "Change advanced sharing settings", then select the radio button for "Turn on Network Discovery" under the appropriate profile.