Attn: Home network gurus - HELP!

[Royk]

I just bought a new PC two days ago. It came with XP Home Edition installed and also came with a NIC. So I went out and bought another NIC and a crossover cable to network my old PC to the new. I've never dealt with home networking and I now have all of two days experience using XP. I have a network PC at work and run Win98. My old PC at home has 98 for an operating system too.



The NIC I bought is a Netgear FA311. According to device manager it is installed correctly and functioning properly. The same is true of the NIC in my new PC. The problem is they won't talk to each other. I named the workgroup on both machines HOME, and named the new PC MASTER and the old one is SLAVE (I was in too big a hurry to be creative with names, so I hearkened back to my ET days).



On the 98 box when I run Windows Explorer and open Network Neighborhood it shows subfolders for both MASTER and SLAVE, so it does know MASTER is out there. If I click on the MASTER subfolder I get an error message saying MASTER is not accessible/the computer or sharename could not be found. When I open Network Neighborhood/Entire Network/Home it shows me only SLAVE.



On the XP box, the icon in the system tray says status is connected at 100Mbps. Earlier today it showed SLAVE under My Network Places/Entire Network/MS Windows Network/Home, so it also knew the other machine was out there, but when I clicked on it I got the same "not accessible" message. Now it doesn't even show SLAVE.



Hopefully after this long, detailed explanation someone can explain what I'm doing wrong.



Roy

 

[gonehuntingagain]

First, you need to manually assign unique ip address for each system if you have not already done so.



To access each system from the other, you will need to also enable file sharing. XP has a firewall built in, and may need to be disabled.



****CAUTION****

Enabling file sharing is NOT a good idea if you go out on the internet. Anyone can see your stuff, and possibly modify your files.

Only enable it if you want to transfer a file, then change it back to not shared. You will be able to play network games with file sharing turned off.



Go to a bookstore and browse through one of the Microsoft certification books for configuring networks, or search on the net.



Good Luck

 

[mjendrejcak]

what gonehuntingagain said. plus you will need to setup a user name on the XP system and assign it to the folder share(s)

 

[JConley]

Be default, XP will assign each computer APIPA addresses, (Automatic Private IP Addresses )to each computer if it cannot find a DHCP server, so each computer will most likely have its own generated IP address in the same subnet. This takes care of the IP address issue. It sounds like a sharing issue. Make sure the hard drive folder is shared, and it will be visible to the other machine in Network Neighborhood.



You can only use share level permissions in XP Home edition since Home edition does not have any Domain authentication available.

 

[856.9]

I'm assuming you just want to get files off of the win98 machine.



Go to windows explorer, and right click on the c drive name, select sharing. (I haven't used this in a while so I might be sketchy) A properties box will pop up. There's an option



share this folder

do not share this folder





select share this folder.



2 boxs should light up. Share name and password.

Give it share name and leave the password blank.



There should also be another set of options, read, write or full access.



then click ok.



The drive icon should change and have a little hand on it now.



WHen you go and browse on the xp machine you should be able to click on slave and see the share name you gave the hard drive.





Maybe this will help.

 

[Royk]

Well, now neither of my boxes show the the other. But the XP box still shows a connection at 100Mbps. However when I cliclk on STATUS it shows 134 packets sent and 0 received. In the system tray, the icon lights the little monitors occasionally as if they are transferring data.



Mr. 856. 9 kind of hit the nail on the head with my problem and I went and set the drives to shared. Unfortunately it didn't help my problem, though it did help me gain a a little more understanding.



At the rate I'm going, I could have used floppies to migrate my old files to the new!

 

[856.9]

I'm guessing you assigned some ips and that's why you don't see the other computer now.



You really don't need to use IPs for the computers to see each other. ANother protocol like NetBUI works fine, also doesn't require any configuration.



But for ips



set one computer to 192. 168. 1. 1 and the other to 192. 168. 1. 2



subnet 255. 255. 255. 0





In 98 under the network properties it should list some stuff like

client for ms networking

dial up adapter

tcip >> dial up adapter

tcip >> network adapter



make sure you configure the ip to the one that's tcip>> network adapter. The other one will cause dial up problems.

 

[Royk]

856. 9,



Actually no, I didn't manually set any IP addresses. I allowed Windows to take care of that. I think I may try doing it manually though and see what happens.



I'm getting ready to take this NIC back and toss the old system. So much for plug-and-play!



-Roy

 

[hanover]

First make sure you have link lights



Enable a protocol, try Microsoft Client and

Microsoft file and printer sharing. You will need to give each computer a name and workgroup ID.



If this does not work, manually give each machine a IP address, you will need to add TCP/IP protocol to if not assigned to lan card then try the numbers 856. 9 gave . Then at a DOS prompt type



ping 192. 168. 1. 1

or ping 192. 168. 1. 2



If you don't get a reply, then you will need to check or crossover cable and lan card installation



You will not need the IPs permanently, but the ping command is useful if finding out if the hardware and drivers are working.