Why is Defender not seeing all my drives!?

SOHO1 · 10 Dec 2016

Hi all, I have a Win10 laptop that is currrent with "updates" and running Windows Defender. I recently noticed that it does not see all my drives.

Local C: is OK
Network share W: is seen and scanned
Network share Y: is seen and scanned
Network share P: is seen and scanned
Network share O: is NOT SEEN.

Note that the network shares O: and P: are on the same LAN server and both are accessible by browsing and the files access just fine.

However, in the dialoge "Select the dries and folders you want to scan:" the O: drive does NOT appear.

Why and how to fix?

SOHO1 · 10 Dec 2016

Found it! For some reason, despite having working network shares, Windows 10 seems to occasionally lose some of the the drive mappings as seen by Explorer.

So, whilst I can see, visit and manipulate files on all the drive shares under a command window, I had to use Explorer to re-map one the shared network drives to put it back in windows explorer.

I wonder where Explorer get's it's info that is different from the command window.