Windows – Unable to connect a Wndows 7 pc to a Windows 7 share anymore

network-shareswindows 7

I have many PCs & Macs in my household…all of them connected to a Windows 7 share.

All of a sudden, one of my Windows 7 PCs can't connect to the share anymore. In fact, it can't connect to any computers on the network. The network drive can't be found. Oddly enough, the server is visible in the Network sidebar from Windows Explorer. However, clicking it displays an error dialog (the specified network provider name is invalid)

What is even more odd is I can ping the server (using either the machine name or ip address) and it finds it just fine. But any attempt to reconnect to the server fails via `net use' or manually Windows Explorer.

I've flushed the DNS cache, but that didn't fix the problem.

I'm at a loss on what else I can try…can somebody offer some insight?

Best Answer

Any updates on that machine lately? I have seen the "advanced sharing options" get reset before. Or perhaps Windows no longer thinks it's on your home network or that it's a public network. Goto the "Network and Sharing Center" and see if the network is identified as a "home" network. Then check out the "advanced sharing options" and see if "network discovery" is turned on. Other than that, could be a firewall issue. I recommend checking out the "event log" and see if there are any network related errors.

You could also create a share on the broken machine and see if it is visible to the other computers, it might help point you in the right direction.

Hope that helps.

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Macos – Snow Leopard can see Windows shares in Finder but can’t connect

This is a name resolution problem, but not exactly DNS unless your NAS box has a fully qualified domain name. The Macs that are visible on the network under the Finder's shared category are discovered through Bonjour and Multicast DNS. I'm not sure exactly what OS X uses for discovery of SMB shares.

It sounds like the Non-Connecting Mac can discover the SMB shares through multicast, but is not getting the correct IP address information. You might try the arp command from the terminal to see what IP address is returned for the name of the NAS box. If the NAS box is named "nas.local" then the command would be:

arp nas.local

and it will return the IP address associated with nas.local in the Mac's ARP cache.

You might try nmblookup to see what sort of SMB information the Mac is receiving. I'm not real familiar with it but I think the command might be:

nmblookup -n nas.local

The samba man page will give you more options and information.

I've seen problems for years with connecting to servers through the sidebar and never nailed down a sure fix for them. You mentioned all machines are on DHCP. You might put the NAS box on a static IP. You could then drop an entry into /etc/hosts for nas.local. That's not ideal but it might be an easy fix for just a couple of computers.

Windows 7 – Joining Homegroup Breaks Connections to Shares

In the advanced network settings where you turn on/off file sharing, etc, in the home/work profile setting, there is an option to have home group use your accounts and passwords. When windows manages it, it uses a common account instead of your account so it breaks the existing permissions. This seems to work for me.

Best Answer

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Macos – Snow Leopard can see Windows shares in Finder but can’t connect

Windows 7 – Joining Homegroup Breaks Connections to Shares

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