Windows 7 Home Premium Drive Mapping

[kevinzak]

I realize this problem has been addressed before, but working with Home Premium machines, group policy isn't available in this scenario and I have tried damn near everything I have found online.

Basically on seemingly random restarts (it doesn't do it every time), it seems as though the drive that we have mapped on a client's Windows 7 systems to shares on a Server 2003 box try to connect before the network has initialized at startup, causing them to think the shares are unavailable and give the error message as well as display as red X's in My Computer.

As I said, they bought all these machines with Home Premium on them (not from us) and are just using a workgroup (not set up by us, we're attempting to clean up their setup now). So the group policy fixes that usually work are not an option here. I have tried registry hacks, .bat files, etc. and I cannot get the damn things to cooperate 100% of the time. Is there an easy fix that my hours of googling has not unearthed?

 

[Protoform-X]

Have you tried throwing a .bat file in the startup folder? The network would be fully initialized before login, then when the user logs in, the batch file should run and map the drive.

 

[kevinzak]

Have you tried throwing a .bat file in the startup folder? The network would be fully initialized before login, then when the user logs in, the batch file should run and map the drive.

It's been a while, but I could certainly try this. Is there a flag I can throw on the net use commands so that it will just run in the background and not pop up with the command prompt window?

 

[Protoform-X]

Put this at the top of your batch file:

@echo off

That will minimize the output and the window will only last for a brief moment. There are other more complicated methods of totally eliminating the command prompt from showing, but I'll leave you to Google if you'd like to entertain those options.