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#1
Puzzling "Z:\ is unavailable. ..." mesasage
I keep a set of setup and configuration files on a NAS drive mapped to drive letter Z:. And I have some programs that configuration files in system folders - Firefox references a user-provided "Distribution" folder in its Program Files folder; OpenVPN has (or had) a user-modified "Config" file in its Program Files folder.
Copying these files presents no problem on 4 of my computers, but on a new Dell laptop I get a "Z:\ is unavailable. ..." message when I try copying into system files. I get the expected message requiring Admin access, but after giving permission I get that "unavailable" message. I get around this by first copying the data into a non-system folder on my C: drive and then copying from there into the system folder. This gets the job done, but the extra step is irritating because it provides no extra security and because it's not necessary on my other computers.
All the computers are running Win 10 20H2. And just to be sure, I just copied from my Z: drive into Program Files with no problem on one of the 4 older computers so I know it's not some recent maintenance that's preventing the copy.
This feels like a permissions issue but the error message does look like a permissions error. I don't recall doing anything on my other computers that circumvented this. Is it a special Dell "feature"? Is there any way around it?