Let me begin by saying that I am an experienced PC troubleshooter and I
have done tons of troubleshooting on my own prior to coming here for a
solution. That said, the more you learn the less you know.
Getting to the point . . .
Recently, I took parts from another old Pentium machine(namely RAM and a 40
GB hard drive) and installed them into my machine.
First, I removed all HDD partitions. Then, not wanting to use an overlay for
larger harddrives, I went to
www.ami.com to try and get a newer BIOS. They
"forwarded" me to esupport.com. So, I purchased a much newer (2003) Award
BIOS from them. Following the instructions sent to me, I flashed the new
BIOS without a problem.
Next, I went into the BIOS settings and configured it so that it would
recognize all of the hardware and such. There were a few hurdles there, but
I solved those. To the best of my knowledge, all of the settings are
correct.
I then proceeded to install Windows 2000 Professional. The active drive is
NTFS. The slave drive is FAT32 because there was already information that I
wanted to keep on that drive.
The installation seemed to go without a hitch. I had what appeared to be a
minor problem with the network card, but Device Manager indicates that it is
working properly now.
"Where's the problem?" you ask. Well, the computer cannot see anything on
the other end of the network cable. It does not matter whether I use
automatic settings for IP and DNS or manual settings. I get the same result.
The computer cannot see the DSL modem (Netopia) when I have it connected
directly to it. Nor can the computer see the router (Linksys) when it is
connected directly to that.
When my wife got home, I tried connecting her laptop directly to the DSL
modem. It had no problem seeing it and I was able to log in and connect to
the Internet. In fact, I am typing this from the laptop.
The bottom line is that the problem appears to be within the boundaries of
the desktop computer. Something is not working properly.
Here is a summary of what I have tried:
1) Uninstalling and reinstalling TCP/IP (including removing TCP/IP, winsock,
and winsock2 from the registry)
2) Uninstalling and reinstalling the NIC.
3) Resetting (not just power cycling) the modem.
4) Reseating the NIC --including moving it to a different PCI slot.
5) Using both automatic and manual TCP/IP settings.
6) Uninstalling and reinstalling WinPOET (which, BTW, is not installed on
the laptop).
7) Changing network cables (this seems mute now since the network cable I
had been using works with the laptop connected to the modem)
8) Verifying settings under Internet Properties.
I have probably done more than this, but this is what comes to mind.
Any suggestions as to what the problem may be and how I can solve it?
Like I said, as soon as I connected the network cable to the laptop. It
"saw" the modem and connected fine. However, the desktop computer cannot see
the modem or any other device attached to it via a network cable.
Here are a couple of oddities:
1) The Local Area Connection dialog box has an Authentication tab on the
computer downstairs that is running Windows 2000 Professional. The only
thing different is that it is wireless.
2) WinPoET only gives options for dialing a connection.
Any help is very much appreciated.
Thanks,
Fractalman93
=================
Fractalman93 said:
Reformatted - twice!! Then, reinstalled Win2k. I still have the same problem!!
What the $%#@ is going on?
It's after 3am. I'm going to sleep.
Please . . . I am begging someone to give me a viable solution that won't
burn a whole in my pocket.
Thanks.
--
===================
Your BIOS is on top of my suspect list.
If this was my machine then I would do this while debugging:
- Use fixed IP addresses.
- Set the nework adapter's parameters to 10 MBits/s simplex.
- Use a different network cable.
- Start a continuous ping to the router, and also to some
Windows machine.
- Monitor the network traffic with Ethereal.
I don't know what WinPoET is but I would not use it while
testing things. Let's keep things as simple as possible!