Worried about Mapped Network Drives Not Showing in Elevated Programs? We can help you.

Sometimes, mapped network drives will not be shown in the apps running with administrator privileges (including cmd and PowerShell).

Here at Bobcares, we handle requests from our customers using Windows servers to fix similar issues as a part of Server Management Services.

Today, let us see how our Support techs resolve this issue for our customers.

Causes for Mapped Network Drives Not Showing in Elevated Programs

Today, let us see the causes for the error:

1.  Firstly, Network drives are mapped in the user’s session

2. Secondly, UAC is enabled on the computer

3. The current user has local administrator permissions on the computer and runs the app in the “Run as administrator” mode.

Mapped Network Drives not showing in Windows Apps – How to fix

Net use
Dir z:

This command must list the contents of the shared network folder.

Later, open the command prompt in the current session as administrator and try to access the same drive, we will receive the message that the path to the drive has not been found:

The system cannot find the path specified.

This action of Windows can cause some issue when we frequently run applications in elevated mode.

As a workaround,  using the below commands mount network drives from the elevated command prompt:

net use
or
rundll32 SHELL32.dll,SHHelpShortcuts_RunDLL Connect

Below solution to fix the ‘Mapped Network Drives not showing in Windows Apps’ issue is much easier

Enablelinkedconnections: Enabling Mapped Drives in the Elevated Apps

In order to implement it, we need to make some changes to the registry:

1. Firstly, open the registry editor (regedit.exe).

2. Then, go to the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

3.  After that,  create a new parameter (DWORD type) with the name EnableLinkedConnections and the value 1.
The same change can be done with the following command:
reg add “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System” /v “EnableLinkedConnections” /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00000001 /f

or with PowerShell:

New-ItemProperty -Path ‘HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System’ -Name EnableLinkedConnections -Value 1 -PropertyType ‘DWord’

4. Finally, restart the computer or restart the LanmanWorkstation service with the command:

get-service LanmanWorkstation |Restart-Service –Force, and re-logon Windows

At the end, make sure that the user can see the mapped network drives in programs running with admin rights after restarting the computer. The reverse statement is true: all network drives mapped in the elevated mode will also be available in the unprivileged user session.

Conclusion

In short, we saw how our Support Engineers fix ‘Mapped Network Drives Not Showing in Elevated Programs’ issue for our customers.