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Forum Discussion
Win Explorer not seeing all NAS drives
I have 5 ReadyNas drives on my home network. All are running 6.10.10 using Win Explorer, both Win 10 and Win 11, only show 4 of my 5 drives. All have static IPs, and all of the normal issues, SMB enabled, network discovery, etc, are set correctly and 4 of the 5 drives are visible. The drive that does not appear in Explorer is mapped and connection through the mapped drive works as expected. However explorer does not see the drive unless I specifically address it by name.
Any idea to have the drive show up ?
paul
4 Replies
However explorer does not see the drive unless I specifically address it by name.
Can you clarify this?
I am thinking that you can access all the drives, and that your problem is that one of the NAS is not showing up in the "Computer" section of Explorer's Network list.
Is that the case?
Your thinking is correct. If I put missing NAS name in the address line in explorer I can access it. Also if I map a drive to the missing NAS I can access with explorer using the mapped link.
I seem to remember that a year ago or more I found a registry edit that seemed to increase the number of drives showing, but I cannot find any current reference to it.
If I put missing NAS name in the address line in explorer I can access it. Also if I map a drive to the missing NAS I can access with explorer using the mapped link.
This is not a new Windows issue (and not limited to NAS discovery). Unfortunately I don't have a good solution. I'm seeing a couple of articles describing potential "fixes", but none seem relevant to ReadyNAS. For instance,
- https://www.wintips.org/fix-windows-11-24h2-does-not-show-all-network-computers/
If you think that the number of NAS matters, you can test that idea by disconnecting one of the NAS from your network, and see if the missing NAS then shows up.
A workaround is to create network locations for each NAS after selecting "This PC" in the left pane. The network location needs to include a share, so to access everything you would need to include the data volume.
You can similarly create desktop shortcuts that open to the NAS - one advantage of the shortcut workaround is that you don't need to specify a share in the shortcut.
Personally I just enter \\NASname into explorer (even though my NAS does show up in my network list). My wife likes to use the desktop shortcuts, so I've put them on the PCs she uses.
FWIW, I have an old Readynas Duo (V1) and a Western Digital My Cloud EX4. The WD is my default NAS, the Duo backs up the WD on a schedule. With the WD powered up, there are times where it doesn't appear while "browsing" the network despite having persistent mapped drives.
When the Duo is on, maybe it shows up and maybe it doesn't. While I don't keep drives mapped, I can easily add one using the UNC like StephenB says above. I can ping them both by name. I can view the shares on both with the "Net View" command.
My IPs are reserved in my router. My PC is on Win11 23H2 (no 24H2 yet!!). I do a full shutdown at the end of the day (no hibernation) and a cold boot the next morning. My WD and Duo power on/off on a schedule (WD is daily, Duo is weekly) so they are freshly booted. Both are EOL so they run whatever is the last firmware released from a few years ago. Despite all of this, they work well enough for my needs so they will keep serving until they completely quit.
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