RCP Server. Continual connection problems.

[Jayce]

My brother is on XP Pro SP3, and he keeps getting no IP address when he boots up. When I try to renew it says something about the RCP server being unavailable. I've never had this error before. Naturally, I hit up Google. I tried every guide known to man that I've found, but it keeps popping up again, often times after a reboot.

Meanwhile, in Linux land (he dual boots) there's no issues, confirming the fact that it's not a router issue, cable issue, etc.

Just not sure what else to do. It's pretty **** annoying to try 8 or 9 guides and each one WORKS until a half hour passes or he reboots.

 

[KSoD]

Jayce how many times do i have to say dont use Google for Windows issues....

You receive a "The RPC server is unavailable" error message when you open Disk Management in Windows XP

Is that what you tried already? Have you tried looking in the services.msc and make sure that the Server Service is enabled?

 

[Jayce]

Jayce how many times do i have to say dont use Google for Windows issues....

You receive a "The RPC server is unavailable" error message when you open Disk Management in Windows XP

Is that what you tried already? Have you tried looking in the services.msc and make sure that the Server Service is enabled?

Yep. Tried that too.

Also - Just a little FYI that I've tried on several occasions (including two minutes ago).... Compared some Google and Bing results when searching for the same thing. Despite the fact some things show up in semi different order on each page, I get almost all of the same results from both engines.

I've tried quite a few different guides (an easy 6-8). I'm not sure what's different about his computer in particular. There's two identical rigs in the house for each of my brothers. In fact, this particular brother having the issue spends little/no time in Windows at all, whereas the other one does who's not having issues. When I set them up, I used Clonezilla to copy identical images to each one, so I know from day 1 they started identical and this one in particular hasn't been used much since they got them in Christmas.

 

[KSoD]

I use the Microsoft.com Search feature. But it is powered by Bing. But it still gives me far better results than using Bing or Google directly.

The thing is that most of Google's results come from sites that have links to the Microsoft sites/servers. As i know that Microsoft has denied the Google Spiders from archiving their sites. Which is the main reason why i say not to use Google as you have to hunt down through many pages of results to find what your looking for compared to much more direct results from Bing/Microsoft.com Search.

There can be a few reasons for this problem:

1. Incorrect DNS settings.

2. Incorrect Time and Time zone settings.

3. The "TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper" service isn't running.

4. The "Remote Registry" service isn't running.

Have you made sure all of these settings are correct? From this page here.

 

[Jayce]

So the problem kind of died down and I didn't hear much about it until today. My brother, who dual boots, went back into Windows after not touching it for a while (however, last he used it, it worked fine). Now he gets a BSOD each time he boots up, whether it's regular mode, safe mode, safe mode with networking, etc.

The BSOD code? Ahh, kind of hard to catch in the nanosecond it appears on the screen.

Thinking a format is in order. There's been far too many problems for this install for how little he's used it. Not too sure what went wrong, but something is definitely ****ed.

 

[Jayce]

Not sure how it happened, but evidently the file system was corrupt. I did some more reading and several signs pointed to that, such as the UNGODLY slowness he exhibited prior to having these final issues, despite the fact several virus scanners came back with no infections - even malware scanners and even clamav when he scanned from within Ubuntu. I fired up gparted in his Ubuntu install and the NTFS partition was flagged with errors about clusters not being able to be located or something.

Not quite sure what happened, because he rarely uses it and no infections were there, but hey - it happened and I reinstalled XP.

sigh.