A local disk drive is not available after you connect it when the drive uses the same drive letter as a mapped network drive

Assume that either of the following conditions is true:

• You map a network drive to a resource by using the drive letter that is assigned to a removable device that is not connected to your computer.
• You map a network drive to a resource by using the drive letter of a drive from a Terminal Services session.

In either of these scenarios, you may experience both of the following symptoms when you reconnect the removable device or when you connect to the Terminal Services session:

• The drive letter remains mapped to the network share, and it displays the contents of the shared resource when you double-click the drive icon.
• The drive letter for the newly connected hard disk does not appear under Hard Disk Drives in My Computer.

Note This issue may also occur when you map a network drive by using a drive letter that is assigned to a cluster node, and when the group that contains the clustered hard disk then fails over to the other cluster node.

Because of this issue, you cannot access the data that is on the local hard disk drive. If you restart the computer, the issue is resolved.

To work around this issue, disconnect the mapped network drive. Microsoft recommends that you do not map a network drive by using the drive letter of a physical disk that may later be connected to your computer.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.

For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: