Finding my Network Shares on SMB1 Drives after the Windows 10 2004 Update

OriginalGriff

5.00/5 (1 vote)

23 Aug 2020CPOL

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Windows 10 and the ongoing I can't find your mapped drives anymore problem. A fix, hopefully!

It's a PITA: you upgrade to 2004, and suddenly Windows can't find your drives anymore. If, like me, you generally use mapped drives onto your NAS suddenly losing them can be a real problem - enough to make you revert back to the previous OS version. And it seems to be a change to support (or the lack thereof) for SMB1 devices. We can't all upgrade our NAS devices or their software (and in my case, Seagate support haven't even got back to me after over a week) so we need a workaround. This provides two, one worked on my Desktop (most of the time) but not on my Surface (except occasionally) - but together, they seem to fix the problem.

Hosts File

This is a "lookup" that the OS grabs at startup and uses to map domains to IP addresses quickly.

So first off, set your NAS to a static IP LAN address - that'll be up to you to do as it's specific to each router, I can't help you with that unless you have exactly the same router I do (TalkTalk SuperRouter, a badged Huawei HG635 I believe).

1) WINKEY, then type "notepad" - right click and select "Run as Administrator"
2) Accept UAC
3) Open the file "%systemRoot%\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts" 
4) Add your mapping: "192.168.0.11 \\SGNAS #Seagate BlackArmour 16TB" is mine:
      IP first, then at least one space 
      Domain next, I use the \\ prefix but I'm not sure it's needed. (If it ain't broke ...) 
      Anything after "#" is a comment.
5) Save the file and close Notepad.

Regedit

Despite having \\SGNAS in my Hosts file, my desktop is fine, but my Surface keeps losing SMB1 devices completely, via IP or domain name.
This was getting frustrating ...

Then I found this - ProviderFlags ([Samba] Re: msdfs root problems even after a reboot? and it seems to be working so far:

1) Open Regedit and accept UAC.
2) Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Network
   You should see a list of mapped drives as individual twigs:
       A
       B
       M
       P
       S
       V
       W
       X
3) Open each drive twig and add a new DWORD32 Key named "ProviderFlags".
3.1) Set the value to 1 (you can just press ENTER to open the edit box once it's highlighted)
4) Reboot.

Points of Interest

With the domain / IP mapped in Hosts and the regedit mod, all seems fine and indeed considerably faster than it was before the 2004 upgrade!

History

23^rd August, 2020: First version
23^rd August, 2020: Removed <code> ... </code> from blocked text.
24^th August, 2020: Added images

License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)