0x800708ca This network connection does not exist

I was recently adding an additional mapped drive to an existing GPO, but the drive would not appear no matter what changes I made to the various settings (Create/Replace/Update, adding a Delete first, setting this or all drives to show, etc). Frustrated, I started digging into the event viewer and found this error:

0x800708ca This network connection does not exist

I searched online for this error and kept finding results where people were trying to get rid of existing mapped drives but were unable to. This was the opposite of what I was after! Finally I ran across a forum thread where one of the troubleshooting steps a user mentioned was to check for spaces in the drive description. I didn’t have any spaces in the drive description, but that got me thinking. A quick glance showed the functioning drives paths did *not* end with a trailing slash, but the failing drive mapping did (see following example). I removed the trailing slash, ran gpupdate on a computer, and the drive instantly appeared.

\\server\path\that\works
\\server\path\that\fails\

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8 Comments

  1. Late to the party, but found myself scratching my head for twenty minutes troubleshooting the exact same issue, removing the trailing \ worked. Thanks!

    1. sorry to sound sttupid but what is trailing exactly. I get the same code after updating firmware. The Xbox Accesories app wont configure the series 2. Do i need to delete device and drivers and start over?!? I really need to map push to talk to a paddle lol.

      1. Kris, this is unrelated to Xbox, unfortunately. This is for mapping network drives with Group Policy in a Windows domain environment. “Trailing” is referring to the slash at the end of the path (“\\some\path\” vs. “\\some\path”).

  2. This was what I was missing, fixed my issue. Thanks for taking the time to write this!

  3. do you guys think that by any stretch of the imagination this same solution could apply to a sql server ssrs report? in our ssrs log for this one random thing that happens where instead of charts we see the tool tip plastered in the chart region, we see the exact same error.

    1. I haven’t really worked with SQL Server SSRS reports. It’s possible it could be a path issue if the report is somehow referencing something stored on disk somewhere (like a destination path for the reports, or possibly pulling information from something on disk).

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