Hostname Clash Resulting in No Network Connection.

[Nestor]

Did an audit recently of all on-site It equipment. I found a few machines that had the same hostname. Of those machines that had duplicate names, one machine kept the hostname & the other was booted off the network.

 

However, the machines that were booted off the network are now not picking up any network connections at all. If I plug in a network cable, I get nothing. Not even a 'cannot connect to network' icon.

 

Troubleshooting steps I have tried:

• Disabling & enabling Ethernet adapter in Device Manager
  
• Replacing network cable with known good cable
  
• Trying different locations across the site to eliminate possibility of bad socket
  
• Tried opening up the BIOS & re-installing network image, but even in BIOS i get 'Cannot Detect Boot Media'
  

 

Any help would be much appreciated.

[localzuk]

I'd work up the different OSI layers.

 

Check lower layers - Any lights on the NIC or the switch for those machines?

Can your switch see the PC connected to the port by its MAC address?

In your DHCP server and DNS server, are there records for the old machines? Have you tried removing those records, and restarting the PCs so new ones appear?

[Nestor]

Thanks for replying:

 

No lights on the NIC

I can't see any entries for the MAC Address on our switches

I couldn't find any entries for the hostname in our DNS or DHCP server.

[Nestor]

Update to complete thread: Replacing MoBo solved this issue.