This is a strange one.
We’ve been faithful users of several Netgear NAS units. They’ve been simple to set up and work very well.
Recently though, after tinkering with user privileges, we cannot access the RN422 NAS through Windows Explorer without it searching/thinking for a while, then asking us for login credentials. The delay is infuriating. So we performed a factory reset on the NAS to purge all corrupted settings. Yet it still had the same problem.
Sometimes we get the credential dialog box (after a long delay), which lets us in with the correct username and password. Other times it consistently locks us out, returning a dialog box with “Windows cannot access \\NAS……”. Meanwhile, we could always access the NAS dashboard through a web browser, so we know it is functioning. It just refuses to work through Windows Explorer.
We checked:
- in the NAS dashboard
- user permissions
- share folder privileges
- network access protocols
- in Windows
- Credential Manager (under Control Panel)
- in the router
- permission settings
- connecting to a completely different router
- in the software firewall
We Googled for answers and they often pointed to Credential Manager, upgrading the firmware (v 6.10.3 as of our last effort), or mapping a network drive. None of these worked. Eventually, we found a comment buried in this thread:
A user recommended changing the network name of the NAS (aka the Host Name in the NAS dashboard). Having tried everything else, we thought why not?
It worked.
Why on earth would changing the host name of the NAS make the difference between whether or not Windows Explorer can access the NAS?
That made no obvious sense to us, but it was fortunate that we found our solution. We drew fairly close to frustration induced destructive rage. So we decided to spare our fellow Netgear NAS users this grief.
Come to think of it, if the issue boils down to the name of the device, it’s probably a Windows problem. Probably why poking around the NAS, router and firewall settings didn’t work.