Thursday, September 10, 2009

Remote Desktop Drive sharing not working

I ran into a Windows 2003 server on our local network today that would not allow me to share drives so that I could upload/download files to/from the server.

My remote desktop settings look like this:


However, when I connected and opened up windows explorer, my local drives did not appear in the tree view on the left.

Update ->  There two ways to fix this.

Way 1:
After a little bit of digging, I discovered that the group policy for drive sharing (a.k.a. "Drive redirection") was not configured on the Windows 2003 server. This can be fixed by using the MMC snap in called "Group Policy Object Editor":


After navigating to "\Local Computer Policy\Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Terminal Services\Client/Server data redirect", I changed the "Do not allow drive redirection" from "Not Configured" to "Disabled" under and it worked fine afterward:




Way 2:
This can also be accomplished this way on Windows Server 2003:



Steps from the Administrative tools window under the control panel.
  1. Double click on "Terminal Service Configuration"
  2. Left click "Connections" on the dialog
  3. Right click "Rdp-Tcp" in the right hand windows.
  4. Uncheck "Drive mapping" on the "Client Settings" tab.