NAS Drive Letter not Working in Windows 8

[Charles Elliott]

I finished installing FreeNAS 9.1.1 on a BIY computer last week. I can access the NAS from Windows 8 as \\FreeNAS\nas, and I can assign a drive letter, say Y:, to \\FreeNAS\nas using Windows Explorer. But, the Windows command "dir Y:\" fails with the error "The system cannot find the path specified." Dir \\FreeNAS\nas works. In Windows Explorer under drive letter Y:, I can see all directories created on the NAS and all files copied to it and can cut and paste files to it. The NAS will let me copy files to it using xcopy as long as I refer to it as \\FreeNAS\nas, but not Y:\.

I set up an account CElliott, both user and Group, on the NAS. There is one ZFS volume, with owner CElliott and with every possible permission set. The CIFS share also assigns every possible permission to that account, including guest access. When assigning the drive letter in Windows 8, I have tried the user name credential CElliott, FreeNAS\CElliott and Unix Group\CElliott. The drive letter is created, but the drive is not accessible using Y:\ from programs or the DOS prompt.

Can someone please tell me how to make assigning a drive letter to a FreeNAS ZFS volume under Windows 8 work?

 

[cyberjock]

I don't have win8, but I can tell you how I can reproduce what you are seeing with win7. If you are mounting the drive with administrator permissions and then try to access it with non-admin it won't work. The same is true for the vice-versa. I figured this out because I had a vb script that was mounting all of my shares for me. Depending on how I chose to run the script I would sometimes have access to the network shares in various programs, and sometimes not. It was quite annoying and took some time to figure out.

Hope this helps.

Edit: When I say admin permissions I'm referring to permissions that would normally require the UAC message. If your mounts are performed via script like mine were in the startup folder it will not require the UAC popup but it will be with the full admin permissions(or maybe I have it backwards now... I forget). I'm not at home so I can't give you the exact cause.

My advice is run the DOS prompt "Run as Adminstrator" and see if the y: appears.

 

[Charles Elliott]

Never mind, false alarm, cried Wolf. I rebooted the attaching computer, and the NAS magically burst into life with the drive letter Y:. The last thing I did was map the NAS using the user name FreeNAS\CElliott, so maybe that is the solution. I am not sure.

Thanks to cyberjock. You may be right; everything meaningful has to run as administrator in Windows 8.

 

[cmfisher4]

I believe you can achieve the same thing by logging the user off and back on (no reset required). Anything that will break the network connection and bring it back will allow you to see changes on your Windows computer (information discussed by cyberjock above not withstanding).