I have two My Book Live 2Tb units that have been working fine for years now. Recently, none of the computers on my network can access them through windows explorer - the mapped network shares never connect. I can still access the NAS units via their local IP address using a browser and can also remote in using wd2go.
I have seen a lot of noise posted on this issue but am not sure of the underlying cause. One post seem to imply that the cause is windows 10 and the NAS using different versions of Samba (smb1 vs smb2).
Is anyone at wd looking into this? I have lost 90% of the functionality of my NAS units because we can’t see them in windows explorer.
I’ve had problems in the distant past but nothing in the last year or so. My problems were usually related to Window “sharing” options. You probably already have these set, but just in case:
Turn on network discovery.
Turn on file and printer sharing.
NetBIOS over TCP/IP must be turned on. The SMB connection itself shouldn’t need it, but something preceding the SMB connection setup apparently does. The Win 1o default is to enable NetBIOS over TCP/IP if Windows gets its IP addr via DHCP but to have it off if you have a static IP addr. (None of that is probably the case.) The option is buried pretty well in Windows. The process for getting to it is described well in NetBIOS Tweak May Be Needed for Win10 NAS Access - Windows Enterprise Desktop.
This one bit me: If you’ve changed computer name you may have to reboot your router.
And almost at the “Make sure it’s plugged in” level: Since you have two MBL devices, you will have to change the device name of one of them. I don’t know what Windows will do if it there are two devices named MyBookLive on the LAN, but I can guarantee that it won’t be able to discover both of them.
If your router lets you display the attached devices check to make sure it sees your NAS devices by name. If it can, the problem is almost certainly in Windows.
Thanks for your input but no go so far.
Network discovery on already. File and printer sharing on already.
Changed NetBios to “enable” rather than “default” per the tutorial you linked
Went inside my router to look at its NetBios settings, did not change them NetBios Announcment sounded promising but clicking it prompted me to input WINS server IP address which I don’t have.
Router can see the names of each of my two NAS’s (they are different).
Well, the fact the the router sees the names really makes it look like something on Windows, but I’ve exhausted my ideas. I hope someone else comes up with an idea.
Anyone from Western Digital? My router can see the NAS units and displays their names. My mapped network drives in explorer are all broken after working fine for years. Any ideas?
You might try asking the question on one of the Windows 10 fora. (I think http://www.tenforums.com is pretty good, but their networking subforum is not the most active…) Windows uses several different “network discovery” techniques; maybe one of them is not configured correctly.
Another thought: try rebooting your router.
I am not having any problem accessing my MyBookLive or MyCloud NAS devices from Windows 10, but I noticed that the nslookup of the device name will no longer return the IP address of either of them. It used to, and a ping of the device name works - the name is resolved. So I rebooted my router (which is also my DSN server) and suddenly nslookup worked. That may not be related to your access problem but it a somple thing to try.
I used to be able to get support for my readyNAS+. I also hear good things about QNAP. Any recommendations for a NAS that actually has customer support?
An agent from WD Level 2 support was able to solve my problem by remoting in to my PC. A number of windows services had been turned off on my computer. He turned them all back on and I have access to my NAS via windows explorer again. The list of services that need to be on (startup type set to automatic) is:
You can access the services by typing services.msc in the windows 10 search bar. I now need to see if I can replicate this process on three laptops and one other desktop.
My computers were originally set up to back themselves up to the NAS every night. They did this faithfully for years until windows 10 came out and then the backup software no longer launched automatically every night because it did not play well with windows 10. I took to launching backups manually, occasionally, whenever I was on a particular machine. Then windows 10 updated itself and broke the mapped network links between every computer on my network and the NAS, backups stopped altogether. I think it had something to do with the services that were turned off (see prior post above) preventing windows explorer from discovering the NAS. I could navigate to the NAS using its IP address and a browser, but windows explorer apparently uses a variety of different discovery methods (NetBIOS, etc) and these services weren’t available due to them being turned off.
This is actually just the most recent in a long list of windows updates breaking things that were working fine and I have reached the limit of my patience. I am going to move myself into the cloud and quit trying to be my own network administrator. Although my two WDMBL NASs have been very fast and reliable, and the ability to access them over mycloud has been very handy, I just can’t put up with Microsoft any longer. I am moving to a Chromebook and letting Google take care of my OS, my applications and my backups.
