Cannot connect to SMB shares on Windows 10

I recently set up a new Windows 10 machine. After eight years with only Apple devices, I finally wanted to fetch up with the PC and Windows world again.

For a day or two, I tried to connect my laptop to my NAS at home. I checked firewalls, credentials, server settings, usernames, network. I checked it double, triple, quadrupplewise. I tried almost any permutation. Eventually, I gave up.

The actual problem was, Windows 10 gave no feedback at all when trying to connect to a SMB (aka Sever Message Block Protocol) share on my server. All connection attempts just ended with a silent fail. In terms of user experience this is a violation of Grice’s maxims. Windows 10 simply chooses to opt out of the conversation.

At a very last attempt, I tried the option to map a network drive. After entering user credentials again and again, finally Windows 10 came up the very first time with a useful error message.

“This shares requires the obsolete SMB1 protocol…” is quite some information one can work with.

Enabling SMB1 turns out to be quite easy. Head to Turn Windows Features on or of and scroll down to SMB 1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support. There check SMA 1.0/CIFS Client to enable SMB1 support.

Once done, connection to servers providing (only) SMB1 will work again on Windows 10.