Troubleshooting • Re: New Windows PC not mapping Pi's drive, old PCs do

I'll be honest, I have no idea what version of SMB I am using. I just enabled that on the new laptop to see if it worked. I need to update all this when I can get around to upgrading from Bullseye to Trixie and start afresh.

That's probably the way to go given Bullseye is now out of support and about five years old.

- there is no Error reported by Windows, it just doesn't see the Pi in Map Network Drive. Otherwise I'd have Googled the error.

- when I map a drive from my other older PCs, or Android devices, I just use pi/password to login.

Which tells us very little. You can do that and still be using guest access. Without seeing the output from testparm -s I can't say which it is.

- I can access the Pi using PuTTy on the new laptop

So the Pi is on the network.

- In Explorer/Edge, putting "\\192.168.xxx.xxx\pi gives File Not Found. On my other PCs it brings up the Pi's file directory.

Confims it's likely a Windows side problem.

- However I have a music server (LMS) on the Pi which is accessed via Explorer "192.168.xxx.xxx:9000\material" (without the leading "\\"). This works on the new laptop!!!

Again, that tells us nothing about Samba/smb.

I think trejan has hit the nail on the head.

If you are using guest access and aren't yet in a position to upgrade try the following on your Pi:

1. Code:

   sudo systemctl stop smbs

2. Backup your smb.conf
3. Edit it:
   1. Remove or comment out any line in the [global] section that starts with map to guest =
   2. Remove or comment out any line in each share definition that starts with guest ok =, only guest or guest only

4. Code:

   sudo systemctl smbd start

5. Create a Samba user:

   Code:

   sudo smbpasswd -a pi

   and follow the prompts.
   Be aware that if you have unix password sync = yes in the [global] section of your smb.conf you may find that the password for your Linux user get changed to match the one you enter here.

Once you've done the above you'll likely need to make sure each client is using the correct username and password to connect to the server.

Statistics: Posted by thagrol — Wed Nov 26, 2025 12:21 am

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