There are a lot of reasons why this error occurs, but the message is actually deceiving. Rarely is the device name actually already in use. The typical reason for receiving this message is that your machine simply cannot connect to the other machine for whatever reason.
The most common reason I have discovered is that a port is being blocked via a firewall. If you have enabled the MS built in firewall, then you will definitely get this message.
Windows uses UDP ports 137 and 138 and TCP port 139 for network communication. Unfortunately these are the worst ports, from a security standpoint, to have open. You can usually get drive mapping to work by opening the MS Firewall on UDP port 137.
To get to the MS firewall in XP, right-click on your network neighborhood icon and select properties. Right-click on the internet connection that you are using and click on the “advanced” tab. There is a checkbox for the firewall. If it is enabled, click on the settings button. You open up the ports by clicking on the “Add” button and then specifying, for example:
Name for the service: (whatever you want)
Address of machine: localhost
Select UDP
Internal Port: 137
External Port: 137
Jason:
I can not seem to correct this error and the setting that you mention here is correctly set(firewall turned off) since we use Norton anyway. I am stumped. The files can be viewed on another computer when this one is plugged in but when used wirelessly it loses this ability. The files from this computer can be seen from the other computer regardless of whether it is plugged in or wireless. I get “An error occurred while reconnecting to Z: The network path was not found. The connection has not been restored.” I can see online that others have had this error and resolved it but have not yet seen what they did to resolve it. Do you have any ideas?
Thanks,
Toni
Hey Toni, I feel for you – windows networking is a strange and mysterious creature.
One thing to note is that in the network settings, you can actually have different settings for each connection. The wireless and the lan are two separate connections and can have separate firewall exceptions and such. You might go digging in there and see if file sharing exception settings are the same in the lan and teh wireless connection
Salam. I think one of problem here is DNS client.