Windows 7: Empty Home Drives

Hi. We have installed Windows 7 Pro in our school over the Summer. I have noticed several times that occasionally Window s7 maps the students home drive to \\server\%username%$ correctly but the homedrive is empty. Under my computer you can see that the P drive shows %username% on Server correctly. I have found that most of the time by disconnecting the P drive using net use p: /del and then reconnecting net use p: \\server\%username%$ it reconnects but not always. The home drives are located on a 2tb server drive and the mapped drive show that it is mapoped to an 80Gb FAT partition somewhere.

If I map a drive to the server that doesn't exist sat net use P \\server\notarealshare$ the P drive is still mapped and also appears to have an 80Gb FAT partition. I suspect that the mapped drive is not connecting to the server but I don't understand why. Any suggestions?

Several very important items you left out:

1. Which version of Windows 7? (Must be a release candidate since retail version wasnt available until Oct 22nd 2009, and you said you installed over last summer.)
2. Where and how did you get Windows 7? (Since it was b4 release date)
3. What type of server? Linux, Windows 2003, ???

We updated everything at Xmas.

Windows 7 Professional [the official release] for clients. Server 2008R2 64 bit Datacentre for servers.

I live down under so Summer is now.


Regards

Silly me... summer in southern hemisphere is winter here in northern! We tend to not think of those issues up here! LOL!

A very strange issue... we have had ZERO problems connecting Windows 7 to Server2008 at the college I work for.

I'm assuming the domain info is all the same, might be a policy setting if you use them.

Or do you image those student PC's??? If so, what imaging solution? We are finding that ours isnt fully Windows 7 compatible. It might be your problem too...

Thanks for the reply again. The problem occurs whether the drive is mapped by group policy, via the mapped drive in the users profile or even via a logon script. It is also happening from a windows 2008 terminal server mapping to a Windows 2008 share.

We used the Linux Clonezilla to image out network, I simply sysprep'd my perfect image out to machines. Worked really well as only built one image for three separate sets of hardware. My Windows 2008 Terminal server was built from scratch and it is also suffering issues.

I have an idea that it is something to do with what windows is expecting the homeshare to be. We use \\server\firstname.lastname$ I think Windows is expect \\server\share\username.

I just have to laugh though as it is mapping a homedrive for users, it is just that it isn't connected to anything.

Try the following:

net use p : \\server\bogusshare$, I bet you get a drive mapped even though there is no share there. The P drive will be an 80gb FAT partition. [Note P is the letter of your home drive specified in the users profile in AD]

Try it and let me know.

I am not sure where the issue is. Windows 7 will map to bogus shares if the server is running file services. A linux machine will not map bogus shares on the same server. A windows 7 workstation won't map to a bogus share on a server that isn't running file sevices.

I have just found a laptop running Xp and it also manages to connect to a bogus share name on a server so it has to be a server issue.

I have been moaning about Server 2008 allowing me to map shares to anywhere. It turns out I was wrong. The problem is not Server 2008 file services but Sharepoint services. Sharepoint enables webdav by default and it appears you can’t disable it [nicely at least]. With Sharepoint/IIS running I can map drives to anywhere on that server with IIS/Sharepoint down the server behaves normally.