New Win 8 laptop causes problems with mapped netwrk share

I'm trying to add a new Lenovo G580 laptop running Win 8 Pro 64-bit to my existing network which consists of 2 Win 7 PCs and a ReadyNAS Duo V1 connected by a Draytek Vigor 2710n ADSL router. The existing setup works perfectly, but when the G580 laptop connects to the network, the ReadyNas disconnects (or becomes unavailable) after a short period - let's say 1 to 2 minutes. In this short period, I can navigate the ReadyNas folders from the laptop. If I try powering down and restarting the ReadyNas with the laptop on the network, the ReadyNas lights flash indefinitely and the drive isn't available on the network. Once the laptop is off the network, I can restart the ReadyNas and everything is fine again. Any suggestions for where to start would be very welcome.

As an aside - I also have an HP Officejet Pro 8600 plus all-in-one connected to the router. This was a pig to install as it caused exactly the same symptoms as described above. The final solution took some time to work out but was to power the ReadyNas down, install the printer and then switch off WS Discovery, Bonjour and SLP on the printer. With these off, it will happily co-exist with the ReadyNAS. I've tried turning network discovery off on the laptop but it didn't help.

All ideas welcome!

This sounds more like an IP conflict to me.

It may help to assign static IP's to devices that have dedicated functions on the network. Just make sure that the static IP's are outside the address range that your DHCP uses for dynamic IP addresses.

You could also try using the DHCP reservations if your router supports it.

Rather than turning off the Windows firewall, it may work better to allow an exception through the firewall for this NAS box, it may show up on the list in the firewall's settings.

Thanks for your suggestion. My router has a base address of 192.168.2.1. It dishes out IP addresses from a pool of 50, starting at 192.168.2.12. The HP Printer is on a fixed address of 192.168.2.100 - mainly because I had such a job setting that up, though the problem turned out to be one its default services as described above.

I don't think it is an IP problem because I did have it all working properly for a day. But then the laptop started doing a lot of updates (presumably because it's new) and the NAS drive issues started after that. I tried rolling the laptop back to a point before the updates (which took 45 minutes!) but to no avail. Hence I'm stuck for what to try next!

Any more ideas?

I've seen so many complaints about certain NAS boxes not connecting with Windows 8.

So far nobody has narrowed it down to any particular cause.

Update:
Apparently with Windows 8 Pro and external drives it requires that you make some adjustments in the Local Security Policy. This same problem just came up earlier today so maybe the fix will work again.

Lots of problems recently with Windows 8 not being able to access certain external drives so lets hope this is the fix for it.

This type of problem usually requires that you change the Lanman server parameters in order to get Windows 8 working with older servers and certain types of external drives.

Perform these adjustments on the Windows 8 machine that needs to connect to the external drive.

Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Local Security Policy

Local Policies - Security Options

Network security: LAN Manager authentication level
Set to Send LM & NTLM responses only

Set the Minimum session security for NTLM SSP
Disable Require 128-bit encryption

Reboot all machines after making the adjustment.

Finally cracked it - and it's nothing to do with IP addresses or security policies. I removed the crapware McAfee 30-day free trial that Lenovo thoughtfully bundled with their OEM installation of Win 8. Everything now works fine!

laser162644 said:

Finally cracked it - and it's nothing to do with IP addresses or security policies. I removed the crapware McAfee 30-day free trial that Lenovo thoughtfully bundled with their OEM installation of Win 8. Everything now works fine!

Click to expand...

Just this week I told a few Lenovo owners to remove all the bloatware "especially the trial A/V's" that were preinstalled on them because it will only lead to problems.

Thanks for letting us know what fixed your problem.