Acquiring network address / network cable unplugged

I've got a problem which has seemed to appear from nowhere, and I can't seem
to fix it. I have two PCs hard-wired to a Linksys WAG54GS ADSL router, one
Windows XP and one Windows ME (which I'm sitting at now).

I left the Windows XP PC running last night as it downloaded some large
files. I woke up this morning to find that it had lost its internet
connection and was flashing up "a network connection is unplugged" every few
seconds in the system tray. This notification usually only shows up on the
very rare occassions when I need to power-cycle the router off and on to get
back a lost ADSL signal. The router currently shows that the ADSL signal is
fine, but this Windows XP PC seems unable to connect to it.

Nothing has been unplugged. No additional software has been installed. No
settings have been changed, and it was all fine when I went to bed. It has
been running fine for about a year since I got my router until I woke up
this morning.

If I view the list of network connections I can see the status constantly
changing between "acquiring network address" and "network cable unplugged".

I have run AVG anti-virus, Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D. All these programs are
updated daily, and they show nothing of concern after being run. I have
also replaced the Cat5e RJ45 network cable to see if there is a problem with
that, which there isn't. I still get exactly the same results.

After Googling the term "acquiring network address" I saw some advise on
running the program winsockxpfix.exe , which did absolutely nothing.

Can anyone advise on what could have happened, and how I can fix this?

TIA.

 

You seem to be fairly clued about this stuff, so you already know that
the XP machine is just trying to get an IP from the router and it's not
working. You could try some static IP settings intead of DHCP, see if it
works that way. Could be the router, could be the XP machine.

 

I would 'take down' the network and bring it back up in proper order for
starters before I did any other troubleshooting. In this case there are
only 3 pieces, since the modem and router are integrated.

I would powerdown the adsl router and the two boxen. Then I would first
bring up the modemrouter, watching its LEDs for anything funky, and then
the boxes one at a time.

Your message didn't say that you have done that yet, altho' you did say
you knew about power cycling for lost adsl signal.

 

" I would powerdown the adsl router and the two boxen. Then I would first
bring up the modemrouter, watching its LEDs for anything funky, and then the
boxes one at a time. Your message didn't say that you have done that yet,
altho' you did say you knew about power cycling for lost adsl signal. "


That's the first thing I did, and it was unsuccessful. The Windows ME PC
continued to work after the router power cycle, but the XP PC continued its
cycle of attempting to acquire a network address.

 

Not knowing a massive amount about this, but could you do a tracert or a
ping to your cotet and see if that showed any problems? Would this
help..was just some thing I did through an anonymiser, to check why I was
D/L so slow..long story and not for here, but it might give you info that
helps? I used whois to run them.

 

Cuzman

"changing between "acquiring network address" and "network cable unplugged"
Either a dead Ethernet card, dodgy port on your router switch, or a crook
cable.
Substitution is the easiest and quickest 'test'.

Best
Paul.

 

Looks much like a hardware failure, most probably your NIC. You may run
ipconfig /all to see if it is still displaying a useful hw address, not a
string of zeros or FFs instead.
If your router felt it's "hammered" somehow and closed the port, you would
be able to reconnect after a powercycle.
If the pc refused to acquire a dhcp address (may sometimes be a firewall
issue) you would get the "reduced connectivity" warning instead.
Try to swap your NIC. XP recognizes most of them out of the box, and they
are cheap enough.
If you have a livecd (knoppix or others) you may try to boot with that and
see if it can connect.
Or swap the router port first, just to be sure.