a disk share problem that has defeated me

  • Thread starter Thread starter Damien Cymbal
  • Start date Start date
D

Damien Cymbal

Hi All,

I have 3 boxes on a small workgroup LAN. 2 are Win2k Pro and 1 is XP
Pro.

I am having a problem accessing shares on 1 of the 2k boxes (from both
the other 2k box and the XP box).

A "net view \\name" of the box most often returns the "53 network path
not found" error. Same thing will happen if you try using the ip-
address.

You can ping away at the machine forever without failure. Also, it has
no problem mounting shares on the other 2 machines.

a net view on itself dumps the expected shared resources.

I have run NetDiag.exe and it reports no errors. I've tried
uninstalling/reinstalling the net components. To add more info, this box
still had an old win98 install. I booted into that, shared a dir, and
wham both the 2k and XP machines saw it and mounted it. Booted back up
into 2k and the 53 error returned immediately. So, it would appear that
the problem must be with the 2k config and is not any other sort of
hardware or network topology related issue.

Damned if I can find it though. I've googled the last 3 nights and
attempted more possible solutions than I can remember without success.
I've compared its setup with that of the "good" 2k machine and cannot
find any differences (same accounts, workgroup, network settings...)

Is there anything else I should try (or retry probably) besides a
sledgehammer?
 
Howdy. When working within a Workgroup, you need to add identical
user accounts on each machine. Each primary user account on the 3
different boxes must also have local accounts with the same username
and password on the other two machines. This is how windows
authenticates users without the use of a domain. Hope this helps.
 
Hi,

Yes, the presence of idential user accounts on each box is confirmed.

After further debugging, it would seem like it is the actual Server
service that is hosed. Running nbtstat on the "bad" box and the 2
"good" ones seems to imply to me that the name resolution is happening
properly.

For example, on the other two machines I can map a drive to the default
share, i.e.

net use z: \\localname\c$

But on this machine, even the above command results in

System error 53 has occurred.
The network path was not found.

The Server service is started and appears to be running as far as I can
tell. I tried completely uninstalling/reinstalling "File and Print
Sharing for Microsoft Networks" hoping this would clear whatever is
ailing but to no avail. Reran windows update, all of the latest service
packs and fixes are applied.

I'm at my wits end. I really don't want to reinstall the OS on this box,
but I don't know what else to do.


(e-mail address removed) wrote in
 
Damien said:
Hi,

Yes, the presence of idential user accounts on each box is confirmed.

After further debugging, it would seem like it is the actual Server
service that is hosed. Running nbtstat on the "bad" box and the 2
"good" ones seems to imply to me that the name resolution is happening
properly.

For example, on the other two machines I can map a drive to the
default share, i.e.

net use z: \\localname\c$

But on this machine, even the above command results in

System error 53 has occurred.
The network path was not found.

The Server service is started and appears to be running as far as I
can tell. I tried completely uninstalling/reinstalling "File and
Print Sharing for Microsoft Networks" hoping this would clear
whatever is ailing but to no avail. Reran windows update, all of the
latest service packs and fixes are applied.

I'm at my wits end. I really don't want to reinstall the OS on this
box, but I don't know what else to do.


(e-mail address removed) wrote in
Click to expand...

Assuming you can ping the bad box, have you tried to use the "bad" boxes IP
address in place of the computer name?

e.g. net view 192.168.0.x
or
net use * \\192.168.0.x\sharename.
 
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