[Resolved] Explorer Can't Connect {network card}

[T R Black]

Hi

I have been at this for over 10 hours. I am building a new PC with a MSI DDR board and Athlon 1.2 ghz processor and a new IBM ata 100 hard drive. All was going well until I tried to connect to the internet. I have already processed 5 other PC's from this bench this week. I am attached to a 100 mps network with a Linksys DSL/Cable router/switch.

The new PC is on the network and has no problem seeing the other PC's on the network or exchanging data. They all see it. They all connect to the internet. The new PC is stripped. The wsock32.dll is not corrupt and there are no other copies. I have tried everything suggested on the MS site. This makes no sense! The system was Win 98SE with IE 5.51. I backed down to Win 98/IE 5.0 with the same result. I then stripped the cards down to video only, reformatted the hard drive and installed Win 98/IE 4.0 from scratch. I added the NIC. All went in without a hitch. I was on the LAN and fully functional. I opened IE and "A connection to the server could not be established." The SOS.

So, the only variable is the new PC. Anyone have any ideas?

VERY Frustrated.

Thank you for any help.

 

[Bryan]

I have had a strange problem occur on one PC in the past that was connected to one of those Linksys routers that I was never able to figure out. For some reason it wouldn't connect to the net til I set the NIC to 10BaseT. It was fine when accessing other PCs on the network but wouldn't establish a net connection when the card was set to "Auto" or 100BaseT. I'm not sure if it will help but it can't hurt to try it. You should find the setting under the Advanced tab on the Properties of the NIC card in the Network Properties dialog box.

And if you have a just a standard Cable or DSL connection, have you tried hooking the PC up directly to the modem and see if it connects without going through the hub?

If that doesn't work then I'd try another NIC card in the PC. Take one from a PC that is able to get access to the net. I know it doesn't sound like it could be the card since you can access the other PCs on the network but that's what I would try to eliminate it as a possibility.

Also if you using the Linksys BEFSR41 four port router and have a hub connected to the uplink port, you can't use port 1 on the router. You may already know this but I thought it was worth mentioning.


BTW, are you using DHCP and letting the router assign an IP or do you have it setup as fixed IPs?

 

[T R Black]

Bryan,

Thanks for the quick, detailed response. I did as instructed with the same result. Like you, I always suspect the card. However, this really seems software related within the PC.

My bench has a permanent cable to the router which has worked for every brand of computer available. I do not have the hub uplinked. It's all systems go in that regard.

What's happening in my situation is with Windows/IE and possibly the motherboard/processor. The indication is that the second you punch the "E" icon, you get the error message. It makes no attempt and takes no time to go out on the ether to look for a connection.

As mentioned, this is a PC I am building out of all new parts. I have carefully gone step by step without a glitch. I even formatted the hard drive the long way. I loaded Win 98 from my original CD. I upgraded to Win 98se from my original CD. I upgraded IE to 5.5 with the original CD included in my new intellimouse. I added just the newest drivers for each device. The only apps I loaded were from the original CD's that came with the DVD and CD-RW. The only PCI device is a card for the digital video/monitor. All tested beautifully.

Yesterday at 1:30 pm, I was finally ready to add the NIC to test it on the LAN and to go on the net to update IE to 6.0. I have 4 new NICs, all different brands, (due to the experience with Dell and incompatibilities). I put the Netgear in PCI slot 2 and the PnP dialog did not occur on restart. I manually searched for new hardware and it was not found. I removed the card and put it in slot 3. The PC wouldn't boot. The monitor card in slot one had tweaked out. I put it firmly in place. It booted. I re-put the NIC in slot 3. It was found and the driver was installed. It was working (properties) it went on the net and I opened files from another PC. I then used the Net wizard to attach it to the LAN as I have so many times in the past. That's when the "IE could not establish a connection" crap started. After hours of research on the web using the office PC, the only scenarios I found like mine were caused by too many or corrupt wsock32.dll's. I had only one, it was new. But I removed it and put in a copy of the one from my working PC. No go. As previously stated, I reformatted and am now sitting with a stripped down machine and only Win 98/IE 4 and the monitor inifile on the hard drive with the NIC and it's driver. I works flawlessly on the LAN.

It's an MSI motherboard and I can find no issues with IE in their forums. Since there have been ZERO misbehaviors in set up, I am reticent to blame the board or the Athlon 1.2 CPU or the BIOS. This is the strangest, most time-consuming problem I have encountered in 17 years of consulting, on both Mac’s and PC’s. The irony is that the build and the install were going better than any other I’ve done. It was nirvana. Too good to be true. And it was, evidently. On the surface, this looks so simple that it just can’t be happening. But if it were typical, there would be more on the subject and people wouldn’t build PC’s. I can’t believe I am stymied by this lame issue.

Thanks for any further assistance.

 

[Bryan]

It looks like you've done everything I'd would have done. It's an extremely strange problem since it's a fresh clean install of Windows.

I guess I'd test to see if it can resolve addresses if you haven't already tried it. Try pinging a URL and then try pinging it's IP address from a DOS prompt within Windows and see if you get a reply.

ping www.google.com

ping 216.239.39.101

 

[T R Black]

Bryan,

Thanks again for your advice. I tried pinging and it failed. I spoke with another guy on Saturday who gave the same advice and he said it was absolutely a hardware problem. He said Net Beui was allowing me access to the network but that the TCPIP was not working. He said some NIC's can funtion that way. He said try another NIC, confirming what you told me in the first response. I thought I had, but I remembered that I tried those while the video card had tweaked (from install of the first NIC in the next slot)

So I uninstalled the NetGear NIC and installed a Linksys NIC and voila! Instant internet. This is the exact opposite of the experience with a DELL a year earlier except the Linksys NIC prevented the DELL from booting.

I still sorta shun the blame the NIC first pathology which most vendors do in their tech support departments. However, I have now experienced an incompatability that defies logic. Works with Net Beui but not TCPIP! Yikes.

This may be of interest: The NetGear was not recognised in slot 2 (should have been my first clue!!!) but installed in slot 3 as I previously mentioned (even though it only worked halfway). I put the Linksys in slot 2 without a problem. I attempted to put a modem in slot 3 and it wouldn't install so I put it in slot 4 and it was not visible. So I put it in slot 3 and it installed perfectly. Very strange. Like I said it was my first build from parts. I learned a lot, but it sure was time consuming.

The PC is now working well. Zero crashes and blinding internet speed. The sig other is happy.

Thanks again for all of your valuable input in helping me solve this problem.

T R

 

[Bryan]

Your welcome, glad to hear you've resolved it. Have a nice holiday .....