Workgroups not visable or accessable

Hi Everyone,

Working with a Dell Inspiron 9300.

It recently went back to Dell because the display had been damaged. Upon returning I'm having a small networking problem. Running a small peer to peer network and the laptop can access the router and reach the internet, but it cannot see any of the other workgroups except for the one it is in and cannot open the work group, gets the "is not accessable may not have permissions error." File and Printer Sharing is set properly, tried with/without Windows firewall activated. Other computers on the peer to peer network can see the laptop, but cannot access it (get the same error the laptop does when it tries to open the workgroup).

Tried starting in safemode with networking and ran into the same problem.
Reran the home office network setup wizard, uninstalled and reinstalled the network card. Disabled McAfee to see if that was causing a problem. Nothing so far has revealed anything except for the same error message.

I'm sure at this point that this is going to be something exceedingly simple that I have just overlooked.

One thing I would like to try to rule out is the network card. Unfortunately I Don't have a laptop NIC to test with at the moment.

Suggestions?

Thanks,

Nails

 

Go to the command prompt and enter:

IPCONFIG /ALL

What node type is the system using?

 

ReggieB:

The node type shows as "Peer-Peer "

 

What operating system are you using? XP Home, XP Pro, 2000 Pro for example.

Was the operating system reinstalled when the laptop was repaired?

How are IP addresses assigned (automatically from the router or manually).

 

ReggieB:

The computer is running XP pro,

No the OS was not reinstalled, the display was just replaced.

IP addresses are assigned by the router.

 

What do you get if you try accessing one of the other computers via:

\\computername

 

Sorry for the delay in replying was away for a couple of weeks.

ReggieB: The computer responds with the error message that says "The computer could not be found, please check the name and try again. "

It's like the computer doesn't really have File and Printer sharing installed, but it shows up as being there and I've uninstalled/reinstalled the drivers for the network card.

Thoughts?

Cheers,

Nails

 

Reading this through again, I wonder if the problem is IP address related. With your laptop being off the network for so long, it may well have got a different address from DHCP when it was reconnected.

Have a look at this article about the "peer to peer" setting. This may be part of the problem.

Do you have a WINS server on the network. That could account for why your PC is set to "peer to peer" and it could be that your WINS database needs flushing to clear out an old mapping (of your computer name to the old IP address).

Also can you connect using the IP address rather than the name in this format: \\IPAddress. SO if the laptop is 192.168.0.10 you'd enter \\192.168.0.10

 

ReggieB:

There was no WINS server. Checked one of the other computers in the office and noticed that it's node type was hybrid. Followed the suggestion mentioned in the KB article that you mentioned and that solved the problem.

Case solved.

Thanks,

Nails