How do I resolve the error "The local device name is already in use."?

Question

I try to map a network resource to my local device.

I receive the following error: The local device name is already in use.

I have the problem to find which purpose the device is used for. I try a command net use and do not see it in the list, therefore, it is not mapped to a network resource.

Does anybody know how to see the list of all used devices in Windows 7?

score 28 · Answer 1 · edited Oct 13 '11 at 05:05

28

You need to remap the drive.

First:

net use * /delete

Then remap it using net use again:

net use Z: \\server\share /user:username password

edited Oct 13 '11 at 05:05

Gareth

19,080

answered Oct 12 '11 at 17:03

dekyos

381

score 13 · Answer 2 · edited Jul 23 '20 at 15:35

13

It happened to me when I woke the computer from overnight sleep. I started stopping service after service and it seems that the "Computer Browser" service was at fault in my case. Try:

net stop browser  
net start browser

edited Jul 23 '20 at 15:35

Worthwelle

4,816

answered Nov 12 '12 at 06:18

Gur

239

score 4 · Answer 3 · edited Mar 30 '20 at 11:53

4

Delete the registry key

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MountPoints2

Logoff, then logon

If it still does not work, disconnect all mapped drives either from GUI or command line as in the previous post, delete the reg key above, and then log off and log on

edited Mar 30 '20 at 11:53

JW0914

9,096

answered Jun 18 '12 at 21:40

Cliff Hogan

41

score 3 · Answer 4 · edited Mar 30 '20 at 12:14

One possibility that I just ran into is that you've added a device to your system that causes other "auto mapped" devices to bump up over the mapped drive.

Say you have M: mapped to a network drive, but you add a new harddrive that then causes all the removable drives (even though they don't have anything inserted into them) to bump up a letter (or two).

Now, suddenly, one of the removable drives is mapped to M:, so your network drive can no longer be mapped to M:, and when you try to remove the mapping, it'll give you a Device already in use error.

Open up "Storage/Disk management" and check ALL the drives for any mapping that might be on top of the drive you want to map.

If there, just remap that drive to something else.

Then you should be able to use net use to attach to your network drive properly.

leeand00 · Answer 5 · 2016-04-13T15:23:12.830

We had a Windows 7 laptop user whose printer was being mapped as the drive in question. But it wasn't showing up in Start->Computer and it wouldn't show up when listing with NET USE. However, if you went to Disk Management there was a removable media disk listed with no displayed drive letter that was mapped as the drive letter in question. If you right-clicked it, it would display EPSON in the properties.

We changed the drive letter to something that was not being used in Disk Management.

I asked my boss why a printer would map a drive, and he said it was so that the printer itself would deliver the drivers instead of Windows having to download them; but it assigns a drive letter without notifying some other Windows components apparently.

The errors that we got for it were Event ID 4098 with error code 0x80070055 in the application logs and when trying to map the drive letter with NET USE, Error 85 The local device name is already in use.

score 2 · Answer 6 · answered Jun 04 '18 at 15:40

It may be a little late to answer this for the OP, but since others will continue to find this through search engines (like I did), I will add a solution that worked for me.

I work in an IT Department, and some of our users where experiencing this error today. The solution was to enable File and Printer Sharing.

AVG Anti-virus was used, so this option had to be enabled through the anti-virus firewall settings, and not Windows. So you'll need to adjust how you enable it if needed.

In my experience, shared drives never work when AVG decides to disable "File and Printer Sharing", though I'll always receive an error asking me to "check the spelling" or something similar. I have never seen it throw the "..Already in use" error until today.

score 1 · Answer 7 · answered Mar 03 '13 at 07:59

I ran into this today, on several windows 7 and linux clients mapping drives from a linux samba server. The problem turned out to be that my root drive on the server had run out of space. clearing up a few gigabytes and restarting the samba server fixed the problem.

Joe M · Answer 8 · 2013-10-22T19:54:23.800

1

There's an outside chance the cause of this is that the share you're trying to reach doesn't exist or has been disabled.

edited Oct 22 '13 at 19:54

answered Oct 04 '13 at 18:42

Joe M

375

score 0 · Answer 9 · answered Jun 24 '16 at 06:30

I had this problem, here is a possible solution, make sure your sharing server has space left on the OS or root drive or "/".

I run a samba server on linux and the root drive was full. If samba can't create logs it crash and from the windows side it fails with the error "local device name is already in use" for some obscure reason.

score 0 · Answer 10 · answered Sep 13 '16 at 03:25

This sounds dumb, but I had it happen to me recently as well and I was pulling my hair out. Drives were set up with no credentials and there were no duplicate mappings. Drives were mapped by IP. In short, there should be no issues, but the drives would randomly disconnect for 2-3 minutes while in use.

It turns out that when I made a small network change, the users chose the "Public" option on the network popup instead of "Work".

Yes, switching it back to "Work" resolved it for me. You can do it under "Network and Sharing Center" from the start menu and then click on the Public icon to change it back to Work.

score 0 · Answer 11 · answered May 18 '18 at 13:32

If you use a VPN to connect to the network that contains the network resource, the VPN can also cause this error:

In 'Network and sharing center', each network connection is given a network type (private/domain/home/public). I've seen situations where the VPN connection was stuck at 'Identifying...'. The network is considered Public until identification is finished, this means Windows Firewall will not allow connections to network drives via this connection.

Restarting the VPN usually solves the issue for me.

score 0 · Answer 12 · edited Jul 26 '20 at 21:39

0

Replacing the hostname with its IP address solved the issue for me. Ping the hostname to find the IP address and replace the name with that IP address.

For example: I had this error with path \\it-share\software\deployment

I replaced it-share with its IP address like this: \\172.x.y.122\software\deployment

It worked!

edited Jul 26 '20 at 21:39

Worthwelle

4,816

answered Jul 26 '20 at 18:45

Jeby Oommen

1

score 0 · Answer 13 · answered Jan 20 '21 at 17:17

I tried the top 3 Answers - 1. delete all mappings, 2. restart services and 3. delete reg key but those didn't work.

In a SO thread, solution given by @wimh fixed it for me. A system account was hogging the drive letter:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5914282/networked-drive-in-purgatory-after-net-use-start-up-script

b0k · Answer 14 · 2021-03-26T12:54:37.907

0

You need psexec if you can't see the mounted drives with "net use"

psexec \\localhost -s cmd

Here you need to use "net use" again, delete if they show up here, then try mounting/reconnecting again.

edited Mar 26 '21 at 12:54

answered Mar 26 '21 at 10:19

b0k

1

score 0 · Answer 15 · answered Jul 22 '21 at 04:23

I had a user with the same issue, but the solution was different. Scenario was they were getting this issue on their laptop, which we swapped out, and new laptop doing the same thing.

This network uses Meraki to control the access points, and they have setup a splash page to accept the terms and conditions of using the connection. Turns out this user never did that and kept getting issues when changing to ethernet to wifi. Click accept and everything is fine.

score 0 · Answer 16 · answered Apr 18 '23 at 16:58

I had the same issue (The local device name is already in use).

For me the issue was related to my subnet mask: the Windows server was in a /24 (10.1.1.5/24) while my DHCP server was providing /23 (netmask 255.255.254.0). For clients in /24 the connection went just fine, but for any clients that got a /23 address (e.g. 10.1.2.3/23), the error appeared.

I could easily change the subnet mask on my Windows Server to /23 and this fixed the issue (no reboot required).

score 0 · Answer 17 · answered Nov 13 '24 at 20:53

We have a GPO set the drives; net use is empty.

Had a Windows 11 machine getting this error but only for mapped drives hosted on a particular server (other server shares were working). Rebooting did nothing.

Clearing the %temp% directory and then rebooting caused the error to change to "username / password incorrect", which then led to attempting to connect directly to a share on the server. This failed, but automatically prompted for an alternative set of credentials; the default set revealed the issue: the wrong credentials were being submitted. Went into the Credential Manager; immediately spotted the stale credentials, deleted, and everything started working as expected.

score 0 · Answer 18 · answered Jun 17 '14 at 01:37

I was having the same issue on a Windows Server 2008 SBS while i was trying to connect to an old NAS.

After trying each of the suggestions i saw here, i wasn't able to fix this.

During troubleshooting i found out that the root of the issue could be one of the assigned server IP's.

Indeed that was. I went to NAS logs and i saw that it was adjusted to connect with the NAS admin username and password under a specific IP address which was assigned to the server instead of server's main IP address!

So for future reference, i would suggest to check if you are under multiple NICS on your machine. If so you might have to remap the network share from a particular location.

Also, don't forget to read the logs of each device carefully.

How do I resolve the error "The local device name is already in use."?

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