Network Issues after reinstalling Windows 7

Abir Vandergriff · February 13, 2015

I've recently reinstalled Windows 7 onto my desktop after setting up my SSDs in RAID 0. Nothing I haven't done before, picked up all the drivers and whatnot. For whatever reason, the network won't identify properly now.

Well, it's not really a normal network, as I'm unable to run Ethernet to the room with my desktop (rented home). The fix for the inability to run Ethernet was to use network sharing on my old laptop. Prior to reinstalling Windows, it worked great, streaming 720p 60FPS YouTube no problem. Now I've reinstalled Windows and downloaded all the needed drivers through my laptop (network adapter *requires* a Realtek driver) and installed them to the desktop. I am now faced with the issue of the unidentified network. The connection is over Cat 5e and I have manually set the speed of the connection to 100Mbps full duplex (also tried half-duplex for good measure). When running the Windows Network Troubleshooter, it tells me that I don't have a valid IP configuration, denoting that DHCP isn't working properly. I've tried to ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew in command prompt, neither of which works. I've also flushed

ithe DNS, which made no change since this installation of Windows has never connected to the internet successfully. I have also tried setting a static IP config to match the IP of the shared network, with no success.

Any ideas on how I might fix this issue?

Abir Vandergriff · February 13, 2015

Alright, so I figured out the issue. After attempting a ping between the host laptop device and the desktop, I noticed some strange happenings.

The desktop was able to ping the laptop successfully, but I got a strange message when I tried to ping the desktop from the laptop. The message was "Reply from 169.254.151.228: Destination host unreachable" 169.254.151.228 was the laptop. I'd pinged to 151.227, which I'd thought was the desktop. So I typed ipconfig into the desktop's cmd and found that it was using the IP address 169.254.87.137. I'd found that to be very odd as that would mean it was a different network within the same subnet. When I'd attempted to ping the desktop with it's 87.137 IP, the requests timed out. The issue was found now, at least. The desktop was trying to join a network which didn't exist. So I manually configured the IP address using the IP 169.254.151.227.

The subnet defaulted to 255.255.0.0, which is normal.

For the Default Gateway I used 169.254.151.228, the IP of the laptop.

For the DNS I used the IP of the router, 192.168.2.1

I hope any one else who might have this problem may find this topic and have a far easier time than I have.