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smst's avatar
smst
Aspirant
Sep 03, 2015
Solved

Mapping one drive to all SMB shares in Windows 7

Hi all,

 

I'm setting up my brand new RN104 and have got a bit stuck with SMB.

 

I have a bunch of shared folders (including the defaults of Music and Video).  I can access the parent of those shares with \\IPADDRESS in Windows Explorer, but I want to map a drive letter to that (so I can access X:\Music, X:\Video and so on).  The obvious command doesn't work:

 

C:\>net use x: \\192.168.65.6 /user:admin password
System error 53 has occurred.

The network path was not found.

And yet without a drive letter I get a success message and the share shows up in the NET USE table:

 

 

C:\>net use \\192.168.65.6 /user:admin password
The command completed successfully.


C:\>net use
New connections will be remembered.


Status       Local     Remote                    Network

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
OK                     \\192.168.65.6\IPC$       Microsoft Windows Network
The command completed successfully.

It's not much use to me there without a drive letter though, so I took a cue from the NET USE output and tried the IPC$ share explicitly -- again, error 53.

 

Is it not possible to map a drive to the root of all shares in this way?  (I have to be using NET USE unfortunately as I believe it's the only way to give a Windows 7 service admin access to the drive, which I need to do for my backup software to see it.) And am I running into a ReadyNAS problem or a Windows 7 problem?

 

There's an obvious workaround which is to create a single "Share" folder containing "Music", "Video" etc, but that feels somewhat clumsy (and I'd lose per-share access control).

 

Thanks in advance!

 

Cheers,

Steve

 

12 Replies

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  • StephenB's avatar
    StephenB
    Guru - Experienced User

    Try 

    net use x: \\192.168.65.6\data /user:admin password

     

    • smst's avatar
      smst
      Aspirant

      Thanks Stephen, that's perfect. Was I being a bit dense with this one, or is that magic share a bit hidden?

      • StephenB's avatar
        StephenB
        Guru - Experienced User

        data is the OS6 default volume when you use xraid.  For OS4 it is C.

         

        You can browse \\nasname alone from windows file explorer, but you need to specify a share or volume name with the net use command line.

         

        Note you can only access the volume if you are using the NAS admin credentials.  With other credentials you need to specify a share.

         

         

        So it is a bit hidden.  Netgear intends full volume access to be used for administrative purposes.  If you drag/drop files into the various shares via the mapped drive you will find that the file permissions end up set a bit differently from when you drag/drop into \\nas\sharename directly.  

         

        That's not a problem if you use admin credentials consistently, but if you mix admin credentials with user credentials you'll find that users might not be able to edit or delete the files you copied as admin.

         

    • snstak's avatar
      snstak
      Aspirant

      In my case it doesn't work, I got message error "System error 67 has occurred. The network name cannot be found"

      • StephenB's avatar
        StephenB
        Guru - Experienced User

        What NAS are you using (and what firmware is it running)?