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We just purchased a new Surface Pro 7 laptop for an employee and I can’t get it to connect to any of our shared drives on the network. I confirmed file sharing permissions are enable and SMB1 is turned on in Windows Features, but I continue to get the error box “Windows cannot access \servername\share_folder”. I’ve updated Windows, created a new user profile, even reset the device to factory settings and STILL can’t get it to see the shares in File Explorer, all while it CAN ping the IP address. Any help is greatly appreciated as this employee has been waiting for a new laptop for months.

5 Spice ups
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Can it see the server - does a ping work?

Is the SP7 on the same network as other corporate devices or is it on a guest network?

SMB1.0 is a bad idea.

Go to the file server, open computer management and look under open files or sessions to see if the same device is already connected as another account - you can only use one account per server.

4 Spice ups
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  • ping does work, it hits the IP without issue
  • we only have one subnet (small office) and I hardwired the laptop, still can’t connect
  • yes … pray for me…
  • confirmed no active connection to the share
1 Spice up
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Ensure the Surface Pro is on a Private network profile and temporarily disable the firewall. Confirm the shared folder’s security permissions include the new user. Also, check if SMB2/3 is enabled (SMB1 isn’t recommended). If the issue persists, ensure the server allows NTLM authentication and verify DNS resolution for the server name.

4 Spice ups
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Did you try accessing the shared folder by IP address instead of the share name?

\theserver’sipaddress\share_folder

1 Spice up
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What OS is the share?

The devices network should be domain, if there is a domain, along with the other devices.

Is the SP7 also running Windows 11 24H2? If so, my condolences, this is a sick OS.

What does net view \\servername give you on this device.

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Uh, yeah it is on 11 24H2. Why? What’s up with this version of 11?

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Where have you been?

New year, new Windows 11 24H2 bug to add to the list: 13 and counting | ZDNET

Above contains the big issues.

1 Spice up
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Busy being run down, overworked and task-saturated the past week as the only Help Desk/Sysadmin/Network Admin/IT Director at my company. So yeah, I totally missed this info.

Thanks as always, Rod!

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Shares should be fine, while there are some issues - this may not be a share issue, but a network one as detailed in the link above. Test another server/share.

FYI, I wasn’t asking for you to tell me where you’ve been, I meant it metaphorically as the issues with 24H2 have been widespread.

Microsoft pulled the update at least 3 times.

1 Spice up
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Can confirm shares are working on EVERY other machine in the org. It’s just this one. I’ve tried multiple shares (with both hostname and IP address, per another commenter’s question) and everything fails. Going to see if I can’t install 23H2 on this thing and if that fixes the issue…

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What is the output of

net view \server

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net view \server_domain_name (also tried IP address)

System error 53 has occurred.

The network path was not found.

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Try enabling network discovery on the 24H2 machine.