A handful of customers came to me recently complaining about unable to access folders in their servers. It all ran fine initially until recently inquiries start coming in complaining about problem of this nature.
What’s common with these customers are they all uses Windows 10 and their file servers are all Network Attached Storage (NAS) file servers which we installed for them. The drives are all properly mapped to their computer, however when user clicks on the mapped folder, Windows prompt “An error occurred while reconnecting M: to
While the more technical savvy clients try to take the problem in their own hands by removing the association of individual drive letters to the respective folders within the server and remapping them, their efforts only provide temporary fix leaving end user facing the exact same problem the next day.
In this blog, I shall be sharing with you my experience on how I successfully fix this problem, with some trials and errors of course.
Upon hearing the first call of the problem, the first thing any IT specialist will do is to perform a ping test to the server using Windows command prompt. A reply as shown in image below means the remote server is online and running fine.
To confirm that my eyes are not playing trick on me, I try to access the server using the browser method and surprising it works too!
However, when I invoked the run dialog and enter the IP address of the server I get a network error that the server cannot be accessed.
Trying to access the server via its file name prove futile. Same error from windows.
Disabling the Windows firewall does not work too. This is mysterious since the association should work if you can ping it and access its login page via the browser. I thought I’ve run out of means about this error until I’ve took a closer look at the error prompted by windows. A particular line in the error message caught my attention, it says “Microsoft Windows Network: The local device name is already in use”. What this error suggest to me is Windows did actually find the server but somehow cannot connect to it as its name is used.
After some googling as well as reading some news somewhere that the latest Windows 10 update will disable SMB v1 from your computer that means if your computer is connecting to the server via SMB1, you could end up being left at the doorstep of your server. I immediately login to the server then the “ah ha” moment was revealed, the server was indeed set to operate at SMB 1 only.
Since Microsoft has its reason to phase out SMB v1, I’ve did the necessary change on the server to allow connection via SMB2 and higher which resolved the problem.
What if you die die must connect via SMB1.
Again, there are a small number of clients who are using old file servers, which are pretty old thus connecting at higher SMB versions may not be available. In such circumstance, the next best workaround is to enable SMB1 manually on your Windows 10 computer. To do so follow the steps below:
Click Start button on your keyboard followed by typing in “Control Panel”. Once it appears on the menu, click to start it.
From the Control Panel, select Large icons or small icons view followed by clicking on Programs and Features.
Click Turn Windows Features on or off, on the left hand pane of Control Panel Window. It may take some time to load thus give it 3 to 5 minutes.
Once the Windows Features dialog loads, scroll to the section SMB 1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support. Check the box beside it, which install all addons within this protocol, followed by clicking on the OK button.
Restart your computer if you are prompted and you should be able to access folders on your servers again with SMB 1.0 enabled. However, I do warn you that Microsoft did this for a reason and the reason must be good therefore do expect this as a temporary fix.
