How To Disconnect Non Mapped Unc Path Drives In Windows

Really confused as to what I’m talking about? Let’s walk through the process. First, imagine that you browse through and connect to a share, entering your username and password to gain access.

The problem is that you stay connected, and there’s no visible way to disconnect yourself. If you try and shut down the other PC, you’ll receive a message that users are still connected. So let’s disconnect!

Open up a command prompt, and then type in the following:

This will give you a list of the connected drives, including the ones that aren’t actually mapped to a drive letter. To disconnect one of the connections, you can use the following command:

For example, in this instance we’d disconnect like so:

Now when you run the “net use” command again, you’ll see that you’ve been properly disconnected.

If you wanted to actually connect to a share without mapping a drive letter, you can do the following:

You could then just pop \server\sharename into a Windows Explorer window and browse the files that way. Note that this technique should work exactly the same in any version of windows.