Question

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  • #2208654

    W7 "Browse for Folder" does not see all network drives?

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    by charliespencer ·

    Bear with me; I have to recreate my original question post and I don’t recall all the details.

    I’m trying to update a driver on a W7 SP1 system. I have the driver on a shared network drive. I start the Driver Upgrade wizard and tell it to let me pick the driver. When the ‘Browse for Folder’ dialog box appears, I try to navigate to the desired network drive but it isn’t listed. Other network drives are accessible in the dialog box. The desired drive shows up in Windows Explorer and other dialog boxes.

    I found some references to this being a quirk of dialog boxes for MMC snap-ins, along with an MS KB article. (Sorry, I lost the article number with my original post.) Unfortunately, the referenced hotfix would not install on my system, claiming it didn’t apply.

    The drive in question is assigned in my AD profile as my home directory and assigned the letter ‘I’. The other network drives are assigned by batch file at logon. I can successfully browse to the desired folder if I wade through ‘My Network’ or ‘Network Places’, or whatever W7 calls it. I can’t get to the drive by letter, even if I disconnect it and then perform a ‘Connect Network Drive’; it doesn’t appear under ‘My Computer’ in this dialog box.

    Any s-u-g-g-e-s-t-i-o-n-s?

All Answers

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    • #2898547

      Clarifications

      by charliespencer ·

      In reply to W7 "Browse for Folder" does not see all network drives?

      Clarifications

    • #2898537

      Stupid question: Can you browse through your Home?

      by seanferd ·

      In reply to W7 "Browse for Folder" does not see all network drives?

      That is, can you see your symlinked home directory in the explorer tree, either as a top level directory under Desktop, or through the C:\Users\Palmetto directory? (I’m not sure how this is represented when your profile is on a network drive in an AD domain.)

      Are you starting this through RunAs admin?

      The Homegroup functionality is turned off on 7, is it? I’ve heard this can cause issues in domain networks.

      • #2898533

        Reponse To Answer

        by charliespencer ·

        In reply to Stupid question: Can you browse through your Home?

        I can see my home directory as I: in Explorer under Desktop \ My Computer. I can reach I: through every other file access dialog box (Open, Save, Save As, etc.).

        No, I hadn’t thought of ‘Run As Admin’. I’m logged on as a domain admin and in the ‘Local Admins’ group, but we both know that sometimes you’ve got to ‘Run as’ anyway. I’ll try that.

        We have Homegroup features disabled in our drive images and by group policy.

      • #2898518

        Reponse To Answer

        by charliespencer ·

        In reply to Stupid question: Can you browse through your Home?

        ‘Run as Admin’ on Device Manager wasn’t enough by itself. The key was Slayer’s reminder that UAC’s elevated account runs under a separate process and doesn’t have my home drive.

      • #2898507

        Reponse To Answer

        by seanferd ·

        In reply to Stupid question: Can you browse through your Home?

        Yeah, I saw that he mentioned this, and your reply. Nothing but your OP was here when I posted, and of course, my post wasn’t even here after I posted.

        I think we’re in for some really stupid conversations of this site behavior continues with the Flying Dutchman posts.

    • #2898528

      The installer may not allow you to browse to the network

      by markp24 ·

      In reply to W7 "Browse for Folder" does not see all network drives?

      Hi, if you updating a network card drive, i suggest you copy it down to the local hard drive.
      To update it over the network may be a problematic method.
      your card has to uninstall itself, then get the new driver inplace, logically this means it cannot access the network to get the updated driver, if the card is disabled in the process.

    • #2898526

      Did you have to answer a UAC prompt?

      by slayer_ ·

      In reply to W7 "Browse for Folder" does not see all network drives?

      UAC elevation runs as a different user and won’t have your drive mappings. You can actually map drives as a UAC user, just launch a dos window using run as administrator and enter your drive map commands.

      • #2898523

        Reponse To Answer

        by charliespencer ·

        In reply to Did you have to answer a UAC prompt?

        There’s an interesting thought.

      • #2898520

        Reponse To Answer

        by charliespencer ·

        In reply to Did you have to answer a UAC prompt?

        Well, smack me ’til I cry and call me ‘Nancy’!

        MMC (and Device Manager, by extension) must run as the elevated UAC account. As you noted, since it isn’t the account I log on with, it doesn’t get my home drive. I launching a command windows as Admin and mapped the drive. (The fact that I could map the drive without conflict confirmed it wasn’t already mapped for that process.) I then started Device Manager from the command line (‘mmc devmgmt.msc’) and life was good.

      • #2898514

        Reponse To Answer

        by slayer_ ·

        In reply to Did you have to answer a UAC prompt?

        I’m happy to share my windows 7 nightmares.
        I figured this out from old installers not working, even worse, the install was running from the network drive it supposedly did not have.
        To top it off, the drive would suddenly become available and real if a systreeview compiled from VB5 (not VB6 or .net) tried to expand the drive, the drive would be automatically mapped in the admin session.
        I ended up writing code to automatically map and unmap the drive when in a UAC elevation.

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