Windows xp intermitent ping and domain failure

Tech Talk
1

so one of the employees here got a virus on their computer forcing me to reformat that shit. so after finding all the right drivers (no oem installation disk for this dell, and almost no documentation) setting local security policy’s and configuring tcp/ip settings i am having the strangest issue’s joining this workstation to the network.

yesterday when i was trying it i kept getting errors and the dll32 service would crash everytime i entered my domain admin info to join the domain, that window would freeze without taking any computer resources and then crash. so i gave up last night and tried again this morning… and now it keeps saying the domain controller for my domain can’t be reached… so i go in to start pinging that server and even though the computer is connected to the internet my ping’s are only going through like 30% of the time, the rest are timing out.

backround info:
the domain controller is a windows 2003 small business server, the network is a fully switched office network and the wall jack i’m attempting to connect from has been live in the past (and it is still able to ping from time to time).

so yeah i’m completely stumped -_-;

2

could be the onboard nic. bring a laptop to that jack and rule out the jack as a problem. Once you’ve ruled out those two things it’s time to start troubleshooting the domain controller.

3

well, it’s not the wall jack, there seemed to be a bunch of dropped signals on the patch cord, but even after replacing that i’m still having that workstation drop about 25% of it’s pings to the server while my laptop is not dropping them nearly as much. it might be the wrong driver for the nic? or a bad nic, i’m kinda lost. it’s frustrating because it seems like it just can’t keep the connection to the domain controller long enough to get set up on the domain.

edit: ok so now the laptop is getting weird ping results, most of the time i get 4/4 responses from the server, sometimes it times out and now i have a new message where i get a reply from an IP that i didn’t ping telling me “destination host unreachable” but the ping is still counting as 4/4 received, i wonder if this outlet is like daisy chained in the supply closet…