Admin mapped drives acting weird

Howdy. I've been finding that the new UAC and linux style permission system is pretty annoying (I'm coming to Win7 from XP). Yea, I know it's proper security but I haven't had any issues with XP all these years since I know what I'm doing so I really wish my OS would trust me, lol.

Anyway.. I made life pretty comfortable by installing HotKeyBind and having it run as the administrator so whenever I hit Win-D I get an Administrator level DOS window. Usually when I get hamstrung by the limited rights it's when I'm in DOS trying to do something so this got rid of most of my hassles. HKB launches at startup from a batch file in the startup folder which does a "runas" on HKB to launch it as admin.

Now the problem comes from the fact that the DOS process is not running as me, so my mapped drives are not accessible. Even file associations were wrong when launched from that window. So I edited the launch batch to launch a second bat rather than HKB directly. In that batch file I map my drives. Seems to work golden. Alas, it seems at random intervals the system suddenly forgets the domain user I've associated with the drive mappings. (All the drives are remote PCs that require my domain credentials). I made another .bat called "admindrives" that will unmap them all then remap and then they work.

Just now though, I couldn't access my webserver's D$ share, kept getting "Access Denied" in my admin DOS. Admindrives.bat didn't help. Manually remapped the drive.. net use w: \\webserver\d$ /user:domain\username pwd. It mapped with no error, but still couldn't access the drive. Opened a regular non-admin window, went to the W: drive just fine.

It's frustrating as hell. I wish I could just make my domain account act like the super-admin, or make the super-admin have a domain user token.

Anyone know of a way to handle mapped drives like this?
Has anyone found a way yet to make a domain account have the full no-limits admin privledges?

7echno7im said:

Is this account you are using in the local admins group on the machine or is there a group that the domain account is in that it can inherit admin privileges (Domain Admins, TechSupport, etc...)?

For the mappings, when the batch runs, is it running as Admin to map them?
When you get this error, can you still access the drive via UNC path?

The account I'm mapping with is a domain admin, which is in the local administrator's group. When the mapping runs, it's running as administrator. There is a batch file in the startup that just contains:

@echo off
runas /env /user:administrator "C:\Program Files (x86)\HotKeyBind\go.bat"

So that launches go.bat as the administrator, which contains:

@echo off
cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\HotKeyBind"
start hotkeybind.exe
net use w: /d
net use w: \\webserver\d$ /user:domain\username password

No, when I get access denied I cannot access via UNC.

7echno7im said:

ahhh your syntax may be wrong...
net use [devicename | *] [\\computername\sharename password /USER:domainname\username

instead of:
net use w: \\webserver\d$ /user:domain\username pwd

try:

net use w: \\webserver\d$ pwd /user:domain\username

Nah, that wouldn't work, the original syntax is actually correct. The password that caught your eye is the share password (if it has one) not the authenticating user password.

zigzag3143 said:

Hey I have a question. You using homegroup?, and a sugesstiong turn UAC off. You know what your doing and lived wo it on xp so why not. I do it because it was just too annoying

Nope, I'm not even sure what homegroup is. The PC is joined to a domain if that means anything. I assume homegroup is some newfangled term for workgroup? I did try turning UAC off, then instead of a "Yes/No" prompt I got an authentication window. I turned UAC back up 1 click from the bottom then set the registry to automatically say "yes" to the popups, that seems to be ideal.

Of course, the problem is one of convenience. I hate having to right click my DOS shortcut and choose "Run as Administrator" even if I don't get the UAC verification.. it's an annoying extra step. I use HotKeyBind running as administrator so I can just hit Win-D and get an admin priv'd DOS shell. Therein lies the problem though, it opens in the context of admin and thus I don't get my mapped drives.

Weird thing is, my current startup-runas-batch method works fine at first. It doesn't start to fail auth until later. Ugh!

Well, I found a solution. No, not a solution, a workaround heh. I started running the HotKeyBind as myself then setup a separate macro, Win-C, to run an admin level command prompt and left Win-D as a regular user cmd. I realized that most of the time I don't need admin privs in dos since I'm usually just doing stuff in my games folder or my webserver folders. A tad bit of hassle, but not the end of the world since I only have to tap two keys and voila, God DOS hehe.

Nice thing is the regular Win-D DOS has all my drives since it runs in my own context.