Cannot see network drive when doing restore from disk

Hello, I recently had the PC replaced where I ran SQL Server 2005.

On the old PC I was able to backup and restore DB on a network drive L: w/o any trouble. On the new PC I reinstalled SQL Server making sure that all the settings are exactly as before. However, when I tried to restore the database, I go to "From device" -> Add file, but I do not see L: drive on the list anymore.

However, I seem to have an access to the network in general, as I can open and run sql queries that are stored on the same network drive.

I am spending the whole day comparing 2 machine setting by setting, and cannot find anything different except that the old system was running Win2000, and new one is WinXP, but I doubt that it has anything to do with it.

I also did not see any similar problem reported elsewhere.

Does anyone have any idea what to look for?

Make sure you have the drive mapped correctly on your system.

you may need to copy and paste the UNC location.

I'm not sure how it works on a local machine, but you may want to make sure the login running the SQL service has access to that network drive as well.

It would probably work better for you to just copy a backup file down from that drive to a local drive and restore from there.