How to recover a lost network drive path? – Windows

A network drive is a shared location on a computer where you can save a file or, a folder so that people who have access to that particular location can view/edit these files. In an enterprise network, an administrator can govern access to these network drives and allow only authorized users to view this. Not only this, they can even manage permissions on these drives in terms of who can edit files and who can only view these files.

Since network drives are very common in an enterprise environment, employees utilize these very often and daily. Now, If you have mistakenly disconnected or unmapped a network drive and wondering where to find its location because haven’t saved it anywhere beforehand then you are at the right place. Below are instructions using which you can see a list of all the network drives that were, at one point or other, mapped to this computer.

NOTE: If your computer was re-imaged after losing the network drive, you cannot find the lost drive path.

Let’s get started with the instructions:

1. Click on “Start Menu”, type “Regedit” and hit enter to launch Registry Editor.

NOTE: Please do not open Regedit using the admin profile. If you are logged in using the profile where the network drives were previously mapped, simply double click on Registry Editor to open it using the current logged-in profile/account.

2. Navigate to the below location:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MountPoints2

3. Expand the key “MountPoints2” and you will see a list of network drives that were previously or, are currently mapped to the logged-in account in this computer.

The mapped drives will be available in the below format:

##Servername#Folder-Name#Sub-Folder-Name#And-so-on

Replace “#” with “/” to get your network drive path. After replacing these symbols the above path will look like below:

//Servername/Folder-Name/Sub-Folder-Name/And-so-on

You have successfully recovered the path to a lost network drive. Congratulations!!!