All drive letters mapped

[cadore]

I have a strange problem occuring on two of about 50 networked machines. For some reason, all the drive letters appear to be in use. If you click on a drive letter that was not mapped or does not represent actual hardware, you get an error 'A device attached to the system is not functioning' This problem inhibits me from mapping network drives on this machine. If I try to map to a drive letter I get the error 'Local device already in use.'

Has anyone ever seen this problem ?
Both machines are running Windows 98. One of the machines was upgraded from 95 to 98 and had the problem under Windows 95. It remained after the upgrade.

Thanks,
Chad

 

[WayneOrth]

Cadore,

We are seeing a very similar problem on our Windows 95 network with Novell Client32 V3.21 that logs in to a Netware 5 server running ZENworks for Desktops 2. Sometimes on certain PCs extra drives (as many as 4) will appear in Explorer after a user logs in. These are drive letters that we do not map in a login script, but still they sometimes appear. If you click on the drive, there is nothing in it. If you highlight one of the drives mapped to nothing, you are unable to "unmap it" using either Explorer or the DOS command "map del." Under DOS you receive "MAP-4.13 (970813) PTF-440: The operation was attempted on an invalid drive" when you try to delete the mapping.

Also, you can successfully re-map the invalid drive letter to a folder on a Novell Netware server but not to a Windows NT/2000 server using either Explorer or DOS.

This doesn't happen on every 3.21 client, and doesn't happen at all on our existing 3.02 client.

Do you see any similarities with what you are running on your network?

Wayne

 

[cadore]

We are not running Novell of any kind. The network is made up of Win 2000, Win 98, and a few Win 95 machines, using TCP/IP. The fake drive letters in use are ALL the remaining letters in the alphabet besides the ones that represent actual hardware. I suspect it was virus related even though Norton didn't pick it up with a system scan. Since my first post back in November, I've reformatted the HD on all the machines with the problem and upgraded to Win 2000, so needless to say I've fixed it. It's strange that I was unable to locate any information on this problem even after searching Microsoft Technet and a few virus information libraries.