Hello, latley my networksdrive stopped working within Plex.
I have tried them on the same machine and i can access all the data on the network drives.
Rebooted both the NAS (TrueNAS) and also the plex server, tried to reatach the network drives.
When i remove them inside plex there is not a option to add them again if i dont edit a excisting folder, and then the will find the files but they appear as unavalible.
Just to confirm it yes, i have had this running for a long time so it should be properly configured.
Nope, or yes but “saved” and i had it working before it came along with one off the new patches one-two weeks ago i would say. (time flyes though)…
I have done alot of troubleshooting already, but i will gladly continue
Don’t rely on that. Windows does not handle this reliably. It will fail again and again.
I’ve found the only way is this:
On your NAS, create a user account using the same user name and password which is also used to log onto the Windows machine with your Plex server.
Grant this user account access to your media.
This issue has just hit me as well, after upgrading to server version 1.23.6.4881-e2e58f321 (latest public release). My setup is very much alike OP’s, where the Plex server is hosted on a PC separate from the NAS that hosts the data, attached through mapped drives on the PC.
Unfortunately I can’t create an account on the NAS with identical credentials as on the PC, as the user on the PC is called Admin, which is a reserved name on the Synology NAS…
I hope a fix can be found for this issue, as it is clearly something introduced in a Plex Server update.
I am a bit confused as to how my conclusion can be clearly wrong, seeing as multiple, independent users are suddenly experiencing the same issue, after having updated to a new version of PMS.
I do however understand that connecting network shares is a system task (e.g. Windows). But seeing as this was and is working completely fine for everything else than PMS, I can’t take the workaround suggested as being the only truth.
The variable that has changed is the PMS version, exclusively. This must for sure have some merit in relation to finding the root cause, rather than symptom treating with the suggested workaround.
I will look into the link you supplied, but I hope that is not the end to this investigation.
Update:
As OP did, I have now rolled back to a previous version of PMS. In my case the oldest I had on my PC (1.22.3.4523-d0ce30438), and all my network drives are now available for use in PMS.
This is not a fix to the issue though, as I repeat: something must have happened with the PMS code between the old version I rolled back to, and the newest version.
I hope we can help each other find the root cause of this issue.
Instead of rebooting the machine, stop and restart only the Plex server.
Connecting the drive letters at login takes a while. The new server version might simply start up “too fast”, so that the drive letters are not available yet for it to use.
Another route might be to switch to UNC paths (\\server name\share name\folder name) instead of drive letters.
That has been tried many times as well. And considering that it worked straight after a reboot, after having done the downgrade, I find it less likely that the issue is with the mounting of network drives being slow.
UNC paths is a good suggestion, if the functionality with network drives didn’t already work in an older version of PMS.
I am running in a similar setup. PMS installed on Windows 10 PC. Media on a WD NAS. NAS mounted using drive letters. PMS sees the drive fine and can access all the videos.
I do have my NAS shares set to public so I don’t need a username and password to access it, but that shouldn’t make a difference. If you can access and play those files using File Explorer, PMS should also be able to see and play those files. This really is handled by the OS.
Have you restarted PMS without restarting anything else? The only thing I can think is that the 1.23 branch does run faster than the older 1.22 branch so on your Windows startup, it is possible PMS loads before the mount is ready so it can’t see the drive. restarting only PMS will fix that until the next Windows boot.
I don’t turn off my computer so I don’t have to worry about this delay.
Thanks for your input. As I mention in my last post before the bump, this has been tried, and many times. It was not an issue with the maps being mounted after PMS tries to access them. They were simply not visible to PMS, not even when trying to add them to any library through the PMS UI.
And seeing as simply going back to the 1.22 branch fixed all the mentioned issues, I find it hard believing that it’s just “the 1.23 branch being faster”, when the drives don’t even show up in PMS.
