I have desktop Win10 Home and Win10 Pro computers that are hard wired to my router on the same "home" network. File sharing via network drive mapping has always worked OK. After the Pro computer was updated to 21H2 (build 19044.1348 and Feature Pk 120.2212.3920.0), file sharing no longer worked. For several hours, on the Pro computer, following basic networking setup instructions, I made several changes and tried to do them one at a time with reboots in between. Eventually, in: system properties > computer name > network ID, I found a setting to indicate this was a home style network. Then file sharing across the two computers worked again. The problem is that I lost track of all the other settings I changed. So, my question is: with a feature update like 21H2 what are the most likely settings that caused file sharing to stop working. Besides the Network ID setting, what should I check first and perhaps avoid losing hours of time and making some setting changes I might regret later?
31 Answer
I have Windows 10 20H2 running here and File Sharing continues to work.
(A) Make sure of the following basics:
Private Network connection; Network Discovery, File and Print Sharing, and Password Protected Sharing ALL ON. Restart if you make changes here.
(B) Run DISM and SFC:
(1) Open cmd.exe with Run as Administrator.
(2) DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /StartComponentCleanup
(3) DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /Restorehealth
(4) SFC /SCANNOW
(5) Restart when all the above is complete and now test
Then if continued issues:
(C) Run Windows 10 Repair Install
2Windows 10 is running, so click on the Download button (not Upgrade Button) and select Run.
This will launch the Repair and proceed normally.
Begin with the option to Keep Everything. That leaves you where you started after repairs have been made.
The next two options (Keep only Data and Keep Nothing) are more aggressive.
