Windows Explorer displays the mapped network drive as disconnected

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

After rebooting a Windows guest operating system, you might experience the following symptoms while working with mapped network drive:

1. Shared Folders feature is enabled.
2. Windows Explorer might display the VMware Shared Folders mapped network drive as disconnected

This issue occurs when the user logs in and creates persistent mapped drives before the VMware Tools service has fully initialized and started the Shared Folders client. As a result, when a File Explorer window is launched it displays VMware Shared Folders drive as disconnected.

Resolution

To refresh the disconnected drive, click on the VMware Shared Folders drive marked with the red X or press F5 function key
The drive is available in Windows Explorer. UNC path access to the VMware Shared folders is available to the user.

Note: Windows Explorer will not do this automatically for mapped drives. It only refreshes the mapping when a user accesses the drive.