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Network drives are becoming increasingly more common when it comes to storing and sharing data on a network. But what happens when you can no longer see your network storage drive on the network? When the notorious RED X of Death (worse than it sounds) on a network locations rears it’s ugly head, use these following steps to troubleshoot.

This is a common issue in business environments, one that I’ve personally had to trouble shoot several times so let’s run through the possibilities together.

A sudden loss of ability to access your network drive comes from a sudden change on your network. If you’ve already done all of the troubleshooting steps:

  • Restarting the computer
  • Make sure the network drive is on and connected to the network
  • Make sure you’re connected to the network
  • Double Clicked on folder to re-establish connection

Then move onto the next section to continue troubleshooting.

It’s important to not that hard drives have a life span of about 5 years. If your network drive is close to that or starts to do strange things, such as running slow, or forces you to click multiple times on a file to get access, backup your files and get a new NAS. If your network drive has already failed, then you’ll be looking at a data recovery.

If that’s not the case keep going.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, a router can change it’s IP range. Your router assigns IP addresses based on the order in which devices are connected to it. In most cases there’s 254 slots to be on a network IP range. Everyone has to be on the same IP address range  to communicate with all of the other devices on the network.

That means that if the address of your NAS is 192.168.1.100, your computer would need to be somewhere in the 192.168.1.XX range to be able to communicate with the NAS. Make sure you’re on the same range by opening a command prompt and find your IP address by typing IFCONFIG into black box and hit enter.

 

 

If you’re not on the same range, you either need to change the range of your router to the correct range, or change the IP of the NAS to match the range you’re on. In my case it would be the 10.0.0.XX range. Changing the starting IP of the NAS can get tricky if it doesn’t automatically obtain. But that’s a blog for another day.

If that is not the case continue troubleshooting.

The last step in troubleshooting a non-working NAS  is to power cycle everything in order of device. Turn Modem off for 10 seconds and on. Router (if separate) off for 10 seconds then on. Switch (if separate) off for 10 seconds then on. NAS off for 10 seconds then on. Then restart your computer.

One everything powers back up you should be good to go.

For apple users, the process is a lot more simple. Just hold  Command/Apple and K . Then type in the IP address of your network storage device and hit enter.