Troubleshooting TCP/IP…

This week I had a friend calling that he had no more internet connection. He had already been on the phone with the helpdesk of his ISP, reinstalled NIC, … If I couldn’t take a look before inserting a Windows XP CD and reinstalling the whole system.

When I tried to view the TCP/IP properties, the “Properties” button was greyed out. To the command prompt then! “ipconfig” showed only “Windows IP Configuration”… When I ran the “netdiag” tool, it returned following: “Failed to get information for a network adapter. The error occurred was: The pipe is being closed. <232> [FATAL] Cannot find TCP/IP configuration from the registry”.

OK there was clearly a problem, but what’s the cause and more important: solution? Reinstalling the NIC didn’t solve the problem and reinstalling TCP/IP was something I was willing to do, but I found out that it wasn’t easy to do as it is considered a core component and therefor can’t be removed & added again!

I managed to fix this by applying several actions (and a lot of searching):
1. Reset TCP/IP -> netsh int ip reset <log> (log is needed, ex. “C:\ResetIP.txt”)
2. Reinstall “Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)” -> Add protocol, click on “Have disk…” and browse to “C:\%WinDir%\inf\nettcpip.inf” *
3. Reinstall “Client for Microsoft Networks” -> Remove it first, when you add a Client afterwards, it will show in the list

* For step 2 it is clear that if you have a Windows media available, to use the “nettcpip.inf” located on the media and not the local one as that could be corrupted.

Below some very interesting links that helped me a lot!

How to reset Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299357

How to troubleshoot TCP/IP connectivity with Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314067

How to reset “Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)” in Windows Server 2003
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/317518

How to determine and to recover from Winsock2 corruption in Windows Server 2003, in Windows XP, and in Windows Vista
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811259

Windows Server 2003 TCP/IP
http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/technologies/tcpip.mspx

TCP/IP Fundamentals for Windows
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc307741.aspx