At my company we work off a network drive our preliminary drawings are stored on this network drive. AutoCAD has issues when on first load trying to select a file from recently used files list if the files are located on a network drive. If you go to file load you will see that all the network drives have an "X" next to them making them unavailable to AutoCAD. If you click on that drive you will be able to open the drive. Once you have clicked on that drive you can then click on a file on a network drive listed in recently opened and it will open. I have run into this problem and have done some research regarding this issue. I have found this issue stems with Window operating system and has been around for several versions of Windows and AutoCAD. Not sure who is at fault Windows or Autodesk. I recently have been creating some custom content which is to be located on a network drive to be shared and updated between multiple users. If I launch AutoCAD and go to content manger my custom content will not load. The reason being my custom content will not load is due to the fact it is located on a network drive and AutoCAD sees this drive as not available.
I have found a solution to this problem and hope Autodesk will correct how AutoCAD views and maps network paths. When creating my custom content file location I used AutoCAD’s browse button using this feature I could go to my network folder location I wanted to keep my custom content. AutoCAD maps the path location based on my windows assigned drive. i.e. my assigned drive for my network content is "Q"" and the path for my content is::
“Q:\Support - Drafting\AutoCAD Support Files\Content Files ACADM 2011\CGIT Custom Content\CGIT Bus Schematic\”
AutoCAD will not support this path due to the drive letter ("Q") association with windows. The mapping needs to be in its raw form to be recognized. Example of the network path in its raw form is:
“\\Cgit-file-1\dwg\Support - Drafting\AutoCAD Support Files\Content Files ACADM 2011\CGIT Custom Content\CGIT Bus Schematic\”
Adding the path “\\cgit-file-1\dwg” to my AutoCAD support file search path resolved my path issues. Doing this ignores the drive letter assigned by Windows allowing AutoCAD to see my network drives. Now if we could only get AutoDESK to ignore drive letters and map the true path when using browse to map a location things would be great.
Hope this helps someone else who might have had this issue in the past.
John
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