Windows Share won’t Mount: SMB Error -50
I have a D-Link DSM-G600 Wireless external hard drive I’m connecting to using Gigabit Ethernet. Until a few nights ago, it has connected routinely with all our Macs, no matter whether we were running OS X or Windows XP. That’s when I started seeing one of two error messages when double-clicking on the drive’s icon to mount it on my MacBook Pro under OS X. If I double-clicked on the drive icon, I would get a “cannot connect; original object cannot be found” message followed by an offer to either Delete or Fix the Alias, neither of which worked. If I tried to access the drive using SMB protocol and its I.P. address under “Connect to Server”, I got a “-50 error” and the drive refused to mount.
I went to the Apple Support site and did lots of searches only to find nothing about the “-50 error” other than it was an “invalid argument”, something the Console Logs told me as well. But otherwise, I drew a blank no matter where I looked. It was a day later after my first searches when I finally got some light shed on the problem within the now unmoderated Apple Discussion groups. A discussion there about the same problem indicated that it was possibly due to the mismatch between two files in the Library that controlled the Samba protocol. To see if this was my problem, I typed the suggested two lines in Terminal:
kextstat -bcom.apple.filesystems.smbfs
/sbin/mount_smbfs –v
Indeed, this did show that one file was version 1.3.6 and the other was 1.3.7. How did I get them matched up? The better question, though, was how did I get them mismatched?
The answer was pretty obvious. The problem had not existed before I re-applied the OS 10.4.9 Combo Updater a week or so ago to recover from another problem. Apparently, when I re-applied the update, it had installed the older file. But where did the newer file come from? It had to be some update installed after the 10.4.9 update. After a little more digging, I discovered that Apple’s 2007-4 Security Update had installed the new files. So, I went to the Apple website and downloaded all that security update and a couple of others and installed them all.
The next time I tried to mount the D-Link drive, it worked!
I went to the Apple Support site and did lots of searches only to find nothing about the “-50 error” other than it was an “invalid argument”, something the Console Logs told me as well. But otherwise, I drew a blank no matter where I looked. It was a day later after my first searches when I finally got some light shed on the problem within the now unmoderated Apple Discussion groups. A discussion there about the same problem indicated that it was possibly due to the mismatch between two files in the Library that controlled the Samba protocol. To see if this was my problem, I typed the suggested two lines in Terminal:
kextstat -bcom.apple.filesystems.smbfs
/sbin/mount_smbfs –v
Indeed, this did show that one file was version 1.3.6 and the other was 1.3.7. How did I get them matched up? The better question, though, was how did I get them mismatched?
The answer was pretty obvious. The problem had not existed before I re-applied the OS 10.4.9 Combo Updater a week or so ago to recover from another problem. Apparently, when I re-applied the update, it had installed the older file. But where did the newer file come from? It had to be some update installed after the 10.4.9 update. After a little more digging, I discovered that Apple’s 2007-4 Security Update had installed the new files. So, I went to the Apple website and downloaded all that security update and a couple of others and installed them all.
The next time I tried to mount the D-Link drive, it worked!
posted by Andy Foster at
8:02 PM
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