Sunday, March 1, 2009

Windows unable to Map Drives using Domain Group Policy

I recently came across this issue while setting up a Windows SBS 2008 Server domain. I have a mix of Windows XP and Vista workstations that connect to the domain for email and files services.

After setting up a GPO to map shares on the server, I got varied results. After relocating the GPO to a higher level container, I consistently got one drive to map, but not the others. After trying different GPO settings, I had no luck until I checked the event viewer and found the bellow error:

On VISTA:
Group Policy object did not apply because it failed with error code '0x800704c3 Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user, using more than one user name, are not allowed. Disconnect all previous connections to the server or shared resource and try again.'

Solution:
During the migration from my Linux server to the SBS, I had created Drive mappings with the GPO to map to the linux server. After moving all the data, I changed the GPO dive mappings, however I noticed after saving the settings that the password field still had an entry. All attempts to remove failed. So the solution was to remove the drive mapping and add it.