I am trying to set up a test rack of legacy satellite communications equipment, and part of the configuration requires that I map a network drive on a PC (in this case, it's an IBM eServer xSeries 305 running Windows 2000 Professional), pointing to a device (a very old IP encapsulator) which is running Windows NT.
I know from old documentation that mapping the network drive on a Windows XP machine, pointing to this specific model of Windows NT device (running the identical release of Windows NT), was possible. However, I have no Windows XP machine, and no documentation which would imply that the Windows 2000 configuration would work differently.
When I try to map the drive on the Windows 2000 machine, using the "Map Network Drive" dialog in "My Computer", I get the error "The Remote Computer is not available". If I intentionally attempt to map to a nonexistent IP address, it will instead return "The network path cannot be found."
The two devices are in the same VLAN, and the same network, connected by switchports on a router.On the Windows 2000 PC, I can open a VNC connection to the Windows NT device with no problem.
I've found a handful of troubleshooting steps online which were applicable, but didn't resolve the issue:
- The "Server" service is running on the Windows NT machine.
- The target drives and folders are shared with "Everyone" on the Windows NT machine.
- Enabling or disabling "File and Printer Sharing" on the Windows 2000 machine has no effect.
- Placing both devices into the same workgroup had no effect.
I understand that this may be too narrow of a problem for this site, so to frame the issue in a broader sense, here's what I'm looking for:
- Is there any method of mapping a network drive which will generate a more useful/specific error than "The remote computer is not available"?
- Is there a backwards-compatibility limitation with mapping network drives between different versions of Windows (especially pre- Windows 7)?
- If there is a backwards-compatibility limitation, can it be overcome?
I appreciate any information to those three broad questions, or any advice about my specific issue which could help me narrow down the problem.