Troubleshooting Network Drives

Troubleshooting Network Drives

Preamble: Field Troubleshooting

Most shared drives are mapped automatically based on department now, so most tickets sent to us about shared drives are either confirming the automatic process worked or because the drive didn't show up automatically. If this is a brand new request, I'd recommend restarting the computer to see if the group policy update just needed more time to take.

If they still don't have it after a reboot, the next step will usually be to find the UNC path of the share in question (if you're there in person, you can find someone nearby that does have access to the drive and type net use into the Command Prompt), then go to File Explorer and see if you can access the folder when they're logged in. If it works, you should just need to manually map the drive. If it fails, then we need to check share permissions.

Finding Share Permissions

Active Directory Users & Computers

If it just looks like they're not in the group for whatever reason, you can do a similar process to finding the UNC path and compare the user's group membership against someone in the same position and/or department. These groups are usually specific to a department or other organization within the college and will be named accordingly, but if you want to confirm you can open the group in question in Active Directory and look at the "Member Of" tab.

If the group is a member of another group whose names starts with something like "Share" or "ShareSG", that's possibly the group they need access to, especially if they have everything else in common. I'd recommend confirming via Group Policy Management before adding them to a new group, but if you have the permission to do this it's expected that you'll make an informed judgement before changing group membership in general.

Group Policy Management

Group Policy Management is an Active Directory tool that's, expectedly, used to create, edit, and otherwise manage group policies. You can access this natively if you RDP into a domain controller, otherwise there's an RSAT tool that allows you to access it from your desktop in a similar way to Active Directory Users and Computers.

When you open it, it's formatted basically the same as ADUC with all our OUs, but it looks a bit different because this is tracking the assignment of group policies instead of the location of users and computers.

For this GPO specifically, I recommend going to almost the bottom of the list and finding a folder under the OUs called "Group Policy Objects". This is the master list of all GPOs in the domain, so anything we have is in here. Scroll until you find a GPO called "Shortcuts and Mapped Drives", then right-click its name and select Edit.

In the new Window, open up User Configuration\Preferences\Windows Settings\Drive Maps to find all our drive mappings. There's a lot of them assigning different shares all to the same drive letter because they utilize item-level targeting (each drive mapping is assigned to a specific AD group which is often mutually exclusive). Once you're in here, find the UNC path of the share that you found earlier and open its properties. Go to the Common tab and click the Targeting button. The window that opens will tell you what security groups have access to it, so from there you can add the user in question either to that group or an appropriate subgroup.