Have you see this error before? Generally it occurs for me after I’ve changed my network password but had a previous network share open on a server using the old password. Before I found the information below I usually just logged out or rebooted and it’s fixed the issue. Recently I found myself in that situation again but I couldn’t reboot without losing a lot of data and I was crunched for time. What could I do? How did I get myself into this situation? Unfortunately, I can be a bit lazy sometimes (which is a good thing when you write computer software for a living… really Mom it is, trust me). You see, I don’t like mapping drives to get to network shares. Instead I almost always choose to use the UNC path and Windows Explorer (i.e. typing \\server\share directly into the address line of Windows Explorer) to connect directly to the share I need. However, this can leave some things hanging around that may cause problems later. Especially if your like me and don’t reboot all that often. Here’s what I found when doing a Bing search…
This post from Travis Eperson (yes it was posted 4 years ago, thanks Travis!) helped me find the solution that didn’t involve logging off or booting. Here’s the steps.
- From a command prompt type “Net Use” and enter. Which will display a list of the network connections you’ve used or are using. The ones where you’ve actually mapped a drive to you’ll see with a drive letter in the local column, but if you operate like me then that column will be blank since you haven’t really mapped any drive.
- Find the one that you don’t need anymore, clip the details in the “remote” column and type “Net Use <remote> /delete” replacing the <remote> with the data you clipped. if it contains spaces you might need to place the <remote> data inside quotes.
That’s it. Now you should be able to connect to the network share using your new password.
Enjoy!