SG Broadband Community

Hello all -

Having something of a sticky networking problem and can't seem to trace where exactly it stems from. We have two PCs on a home network, both home-built. The one I'm writing from we'll call Dave, and the problematic one we'll call Don. Three days ago, Dave and Don were communicating fine - both on WinXP w/SP1, MS File & Print sharing (simple), both accessing RR cable through a Linksys BEFSR41 that has DHCP active.

Then, Sunday, Don has a HD failure and has to reinstall WinXP to get going again. Thereafter, his network connections (one installed Dlink card and one built-in to Abit MB) won't gather IP addresses automatically. If we manually assign him to 192.168.1.101, we can at least get files shared between, but he can't access the Internet.

We've tried ipconfig/release and /renew, they do nothing. His ipconfig /all looks like this:
Host Name ........................ : Don
Primary DNS Suffix ............... :
Node Type ........................ : Unknown
IP Routing Enabled ............... : No
WINS Proxy Enabled ............... : No

Connection-specific DNS Suffix ... :
Description ...................... : NVIDIDA NForce MCP Networking controller
Physical address ................. : 00-50-8D-F7-58-EF
DHCP Enabled ..................... : Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled ........ : Yes
Autoconfiguration IP Address ..... : 169.254.74.73
Subnet Mask ...................... : 255.255.0.0
Default Gateway .................. :

Now, I've read around and I know the 169.254.x.x spells trouble, but the damn thing worked three days ago, so I don't believe it's a hardware issue. (For the sake of argument, we've also replaced the Cat5 cable and tried a different port on the router.) We also removed MS F&P, Client for MS Networks, and kicked every one of his network connections out of the Device Manager, and rebooted. Came back up exactly the same way.


Any thoughts? TIA.

4 things to try....

1. reboot
2. ipconfig /release ..../renew
3. services.msc make sure dhcp client service is running.
4. try a new NIC to isolate hardware

YikeS

1. Gee, thanks.
2. As stated above, does nothing.
3. DHCP client and DNS both running.
4. As stated above, have already tried both D-link NIC and built-in NIC on board.

Oh, and I forgot to mention above, Dave will talk fine directly into the router by entering 192.168.1.1 into browser, but Don won't.

To get him up and running quickly on the internet, follow this static LAN IP guide.
http://www.speedguide.net/read_articles.php?id=177

Now other things to try, update drivers for your chipset to the latest, which would include NIC drivers.

When you had the DLink card installed, did you uninstall it from Device Mangler before powering down and removing the card physically?

Did the XP firewall somehow get enabled? I'm wondering if it's something to do with the network setup wizard creating a few things. Remove all connections in Network Properties...and try starting from scratch, while plugged into the router. Should just create one single local area connection, with services and TCP bound to your onboard NIC.

Well, you'd expect that static IP business to work, wouldn't you? As I said above though, all that would get us was Don talking to Dave, no connection out of the router. The one thing we didn't actually try was putting the router's address in the DNS block, that might have been interesting.

Didn't think of updating chip drivers, that might have been useful too.

Never actually physically removed the Dlink card, just switched the cable over to the on-board connection. Did, however, remove everything from the Device Mangler and reboot. Both connections got automatically reinstalled, with all services, and TCP/IP bound to the one that was plugged into the router. Firewall never came up.

You may have noticed, that I've been using the past tense. That's because we got fed up with playing around and used the big hammer - full drive repartition and new installation of XP. That'll get it nearly every time, and it did. Thanks for trying to help, though.

davesmind wrote:Well, you'd expect that static IP business to work, wouldn't you? As I said above though, all that would get us was Don talking to Dave, no connection out of the router. The one thing we didn't actually try was putting the router's address in the DNS block, that might have been interesting.

Because you also need a gateway and DNS entry, else all you will get is LAN access, no WAN access. You didn't state above that you also entered a gateway or correct DNS.

We had the same problem at work using Windows 2000. We even tried a new NIC and had the same problem. Reinstalling windows corrected the issue.