How do I refresh network drives that were not accessible during boot up

Question

On a work laptop (WinXP) (@work) I normally get 5-6 network drives mapped on boot, say "M, N, O, P, Q, R"

Of course, if I (re)boot at home, I don't get these connections - fine.

However - once I'm reconnected at work the next day, with 12 applications open I want to access something on the "Q" drive but can't.

Is there an Exploring keyboard shortcut/menu action to "refresh" mapped network drives?

It seems totally illogical to have to shut down 12 apps and reboot in order to continue working!

Solution 1

I suspect that you may have to map them yourself. You don't really need to reboot to do so. What you do need, however, are the names of the shares and the system they are hosted on. This you'll need to get after you log in on your work LAN, and save them so you don't have to reboot every time.

This information can be found in the registry, if you have access to it. The path needed will be in the following location:

\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Network\{drive letter}\RemotePath

Once you have that info for each drive, you can re-map them by hand, or create a .bat file on your desktop and run that to map them.

The Batch file would look something like the following:

@echo off
net use m: <value of RemotePath for M drive>
net use n: <value of RemotePath for N drive>

There should be a line for each drive you want to map.

Solution 2

Where I work, the network drives are mapped via a startup script each time we log in and if we need to reconnect, we just kick off the script again. Or you could easily create your own script/batch file to map the drives whenever you need to do this using NET USE statements in a .bat file.

Comments

[outsideblasts]

Does it not work to just close and reopen the explorer window? Or F5 to refresh.

[Software Guy]

No unfortunately this would only work if the drives were in the list "moments" ago, and needed a quick refresh just to repaint the screen.