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Cannot disconnect mapped drive

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humbletech99

Programmer
Nov 22, 2005
155
GB
I can't disconnect some drives that are mapped on a WinXP Pro workstation. I wanted to remove the drive mapping names as they were badly outdated and so deleted the registry key

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ComputerDescriptions

where the entries were found and then rebooted.

Now the connections show up as "Disconnected Network Drive" but all still work. However, I can't disconnect any of them and the "Disconnected Network Drive" will not update to the name of the machine/share even when I go into the share and use it.

Really, this is a test machine because I wanted to apply a reg via policyto clear out the strings on logon/logoff so that these were fixed all over the company. I don't understand why this thing is misbehaving though, the key get's recreated and has the name of one machine, but not the others...

Any ideas how I can fix this?
 
The best thing I've found was a VBS script by Mark MacLachlan, this guy is a freaking life saver. Check out faq329-5798 and look for the part about disconnecting all mapped drives. Pretty much all you have to do is run that part of it and it should work. Good luck!

Cheers
Rob
 
Had same problem, manage to sort it for us here.

BEWARE OF EDITING YOUR REGISTRY, I TAKE NO RESPONSABILITY FOR ANY UNDESIRABLE RESULTS!!!!

Log onto machine as Admin, run regedit, search for the mapped drive, if say Q was mapped to \\svr1\data search for svr1\data. see if any keys come up with a value that includes the path (usually the key "scripts" with a value of "\\svr1\data\script.bat".
Either delete the keys or if in our case we moved the server, change the value to suit the new server ie "\\svr2\data\script.bat".
Ignore any keys with the path in the key name.

The other important key in the search is "hkey user\..\network\Q"(Q is the mapped drive).
Delete the entire key "Q" and its contents.

Reboot and the drive should have gone.
 
Amendment to above :-

The script key may read "\\svr1\data\script.bat" OR SOMETHING SIMILAR (not exact wording!)
 
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