Solving Home Network Weirdness Problem

[FredGarvin]

All right folks...a little help if you can.

I have had a home wireless network for a while. It's between my desktop (the server) and my laptop. It's about as simple as you can get. It has been working fine up until a month or so ago.

My desktop has 2 hard drives, both of which I have as shared drives for the network. Now, when I try to look at my second hard drive via. my laptop, I get an error saying the server doesn't have enough memory for that action, and doesn't even let me map to the drive any more.

It makes no sense to me as to why I would not have enough memory. Has anyone seen this and know how to remedy this? I am not having any luck finding an answer on my own.

Thanks!

 

[mheslep]

All right folks...a little help if you can.

I have had a home wireless network for a while. It's between my desktop (the server) and my laptop. It's about as simple as you can get. It has been working fine up until a month or so ago.

My desktop has 2 hard drives, both of which I have as shared drives for the network. Now, when I try to look at my second hard drive via. my laptop, I get an error saying the server doesn't have enough memory for that action, and doesn't even let me map to the drive any more.

It makes no sense to me as to why I would not have enough memory. Has anyone seen this and know how to remedy this? I am not having any luck finding an answer on my own.

Thanks!

Doesn't appear that this is directly dependent on the fact that your network is wireless. From the term 'shared', I assume the server / laptop are both MS Windows based? If so, try grabbing the exact text of the error message and google it along with 'Windows XP' or whatever version it happens to be.

Barring some more insight to the problem, the brute force, time consuming and possibly useless approach would be to log on the server directly and start pulling off various junkware programs that happen to be running as reported by Task Manager (ctrl-alt-del).

 

[MATLABdude]

Have you reset the computer that hosts the C and D drive? If so, another thing you could try is to un-share the D drive, and after resetting, re-share it. Yeah, typical software solution.

 

[FredGarvin]

Sorry I let this slip for a bit...

Thanks for the ideas. I have reset the host. Actually, I do that every night. I don't leave my computers on all the time. I also un-shared it and re-shared it. Still the same thing.

I'll try the brute force idea next.

 

[minger]

I would assume its a disk problem rather than a server problem. It wouldn't really make a whole lot of sense that a few junkware processes would affect one disk and not the other.

I would just check the disk and see if it's possibly too full. If so, clean some space off.

 

[mheslep]

I would assume its a disk problem rather than a server problem. It wouldn't really make a whole lot of sense that a few junkware processes would affect one disk and not the other.

I would just check the disk and see if it's possibly too full. If so, clean some space off.

Which removing junkware / bloatware will do.

 

[FredGarvin]

The drive in question has PLENTY of available space. I have run 3 different malware cleaners as well. I'll keep trying though.

 

[minger]

Which removing junkware / bloatware will do.

While those things are a pain in the ***, they really don't take up much disk space.

So, we have two drives, both readily accessible from the host machine, and both with plenty of disk space. Both are shared on the local network but one recently became unaccessible from another machine.

Quite weird; perhaps trying plugging the unaccessible drive into another SATA/IDE port?

I'm really stretching at this time.

 

[FredGarvin]

You pretty much summed it up Minger. It literally was fine one day and not the next with no changes made. (When I say it like that it makes it sound even more like a spyware/malware issue)

That's not a bad idea. I can do that with swapping ports. I'll give that a go too. The next step will be to completely re-set up my network. Oy. I really don't want to do that.

 

[harborsparrow]

I have noticed, over time, that Microsoft Windows updates continually make using shared drives more difficult. Apparently, they are trying to make Windows more secure. It became so annoying to me that I did the following:

1) converted everything to fixed IP addresses (on my local network behind the FIOS router)
2) access shared drives by fixed IP address rather than Netbios computer name; for example:

\\192.168.1.8\C_shared

instead of

\\warbler\C_shared

This has worked consistently--as long as the shared drive is on a desktop. Microsoft Windows apparently will not share a drive from a laptop NO MATTER WHAT. I'm not sure how it can tell, but I do believe this to be the case. The laptop can reach shared drives, but the shares themselves need to be on non-laptop machines.

Maybe some of this will help you. Or maybe not. I'm not really sure why one of your drives still works. Is the one that stopped working on the C: (system) drive, by any chance? If it is, I would especially suspect Windows security of having done it to you.