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Laptop not on domain but does not login to mapped network drives

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People come in to the office with their laptops. They connect them to the network but the laptops are not on the domain. (I don’t know if that is the right way to do things) Anyway the boss used to find that when he first logged into windows and tried to access one of his mapped network drives (on the server) that he had to enter a username and password that had permission to access the drives in question. Once he had done it for one, it wasn’t necessary for the rest of the mapped drives.

Anyway, I managed to solve this problem by making sure that his windows username and password matched a username and password of one of the users entered on the server. Then, when he logged into windows and tried to access the network drives on the server it validated his username and password behind the scenes. In other words, he wasn’t asked to enter his server username and password because he had already entered these when he logged in to Windows.

He has just bought himself a new PC and installed all his software. Once again the laptop was set up with a non-matching username and password. Once again I altered it so that the Windows username and password. Unfortunately, it is still asking us to enter qualifying username and password when we try to access the network drives.

Either I have forgotten what I did last time or there is something that I just don’t know. Can anyone help me?

Thank you

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Clarifications

In reply to Laptop not on domain but does not login to mapped network drives

Clarifications

re: network passwords…

In reply to Laptop not on domain but does not login to mapped network drives

If the new computer runs Windows XP HOME that may be your problem. The Home edition of XP doesn’t remember network passwords.

I can think of two solutions, if this is in fact the cause of your problem.

Option 1) Create a batch script that uses the “net use” command to map his drives. The biggest problem with this is that his password will be stored in plain text in the .bat file, so this may not be acceptable.

Option 2)

After searching, I found a freeware utility that addresses this problem
( http://web.cheapnet.it/andrea_novero/download.htm )

Of course, who’s to say what security, if any is built into the program… by that, I mean that I don’t know how this program stores passwords (plain text, or other formats) and even if it does encrypt passwords, how strong or weak is the encryption.

I hope this info is helpful (and not too late). I found your post in trying to solve the same problem for myself, so I figured I’d share in case you (or anyone else) wants to try this solution.

If anyone finds a different or better solution for XP HOME users, I’d appreciate it if you would post your solution here, so that I and others can benefit from your experience too.

-Phil

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