After running into an issue with setting up Google Drive For Desktop on both Windows 10 and 11, I found that it’s a common error and that there is a lot of useless information out there on how to resolve it
Here’s how I resolved the “Something Went Wrong” error in Google Drive on Windows 10/11
The Problem
When setting up Google Drive For Desktops on a Windows 10/11 Pro installation, the user is asked to sign in and a web browser window/tab is opened to the Google sign in page. Once the user goes through the normal steps to sign in, they’re then told to be sure they are using an authentic copy of Drive For Desktops downloaded directly from Google Drive’s site and not a third party for security. When the user continues the log in process, they’re presented with an error that simply says “Something Went Wrong” and nothing else happens. Clicking the “Next” button/link just brings the user to their account page. Additionally, if the user switches windows back to the Google Drive window, the “To continue, finish signing in” prompt and the animation of a spinning wheel will continue to be display until the user either clicks “Back” or the authentication times out. A
community support sites, useful but mostly trash
Yep, you read that right. While there are some really great nuggets of wisdom to be found online, like StackExchange.com‘s 183 Q&A Community sites (which includes ServerFault.com and StackOverflow.com, two of the most useful sites for getting your questions answered regarding server administration and programming) and many others where you can ask questions and get answers to them.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of Q&A and Community assistance/support sites might have started out with some good answers from knowledgeable people, but users now have to sift through the wrong answers, automated reply “answers”, answers that could have worked but the requesting party never returned to validate the answer, and other, much worse responses to questions (although moderation of these sites has helped to remove the blatantly offensive responses to some degree).
Typically, users will eventually figure out that nobody has posted a verified answer most of the time. But, if they spend enough time searching and then sifting through the [male bovine excrement], they’ll eventually hit on enough tidbits of contextual clues to formulate a possible answer, or they’ll finally hit on the answer directly.
Very similar to how many of the people in the future will have find this article. But, at least this article has the correct answer, or at least, it has the correct answer at this time and for situations most like my own.
System State
Here’s a quick outline of how the Windows machine I was using when encountering this error was generally configured, specifically the state of Windows and the software related to the issue at the time. Hopefully, this helps you get an idea of whether or not your system might benefit from the fix given here.
- Windows 10: Fresh Install (first encounter with issue)
- Windows 11: Upgraded Window 10 install (second encounter)
- Google Drive software was indeed downloaded directly from Google.
- Firefox installed, synced with my Mozilla account and various extensions installed.
- Chrome installed, synced with Google account, various extensions installed.
- Wireguard VPN client installed, 2 configurations for secure access to separate client networks.
No other information about the hardware or software configuration of my system is needed as the above are the only pertinent bits.
The Solution
The solution was simple enough, and the only reason I was stumped this second time is the length of time between my first encounter and the second. 2 years or so between incidents and I hadn’t written anything down (that I still had available to review), nor had it been so difficult to resolve that it stuck in my mind. Of course, this is why I’m posting this article, so I have a record of the fix that I (hopefully) will look up if I encounter it again.
The solution was simple enough once I really thought about what was going on.
Solution Part 1
- Disconnect all VPNs, shutting the client software completely if necessary.
Simple enough, don’t even know I didn’t think about it, since a VPN can cause your location to seem to be somewhere other than your normal geographic location, causing security measures on many sites to end up flagging your connection.
So, I shut down both of my Wireguard based VPN connections that are (lately) almost always connected during work periods.
I moved on to part 2 before even bothering to test the authentication issue, since I knew the second part of the solution would be simple enough to accomplish as well and even though it doesn’t declare which item was the issue causing item, the two were both fast and simple to put in place and I just wanted to get this done, haha. So, on to the second part of the solution!
Solution Part 2
- Disable Browser Extensions or temporarily change your default browser to one that does not have extensions installed.
My default browser was Firefox and I had also tried making Chrome my default while trying to resolve this issue, but both of them had browser extensions installed, some of which I rely on, and others that weren’t critical but I wouldn’t have thought about disabling them necessarily.
Rather than try disabling non-essential extensions and then disabling what I considered essential extensions one by one and checking to see if each round of disabling extensions resolved the issue, I just bypassed all that and went straight to using Microsoft Edge as my default browser temporarily, performing the Google Drive setup and account authentication, then switching back to Firefox as my default browser.
It’s alive! It’s Alive!
The wrap up is simple enough, shutting down my VPN connections and switching (temporarily) my default browser to Microsoft Edge because it had no extensions installed versus Chrome and Firefox which both had quite a few installed, resulted in Google Drive’s setup and authentication to work flawlessly, and I was quickly back in business with my Drive files syncing right away.
So there you have it, the paragraph above tells you my result, a working Google Drive For Desktops, and after reverting the default browser setting back to Firefox, nothing was even permanently changed by the fix procedure other than Google Drive working again.
That’s a win in my book
