Question,

I have a windows XP desktop that is hard wired to LAN. I got a blue screen telling me that a driver was not working properly, so I rebooted and the thing wouldnt boot. I brought it up in safe mode and saw it was stalling at the drivers.

Anyway, long story short, I installed a parallel copy of XP from the install disk, and used its drivers folder to reset the broken install.

It boots fine now, but I cannot connect to any web pages.

I can connect to direct IP addresses, like for google, but I cant seen to get it to talk to the DNS on my router. Two other machines share the same DNS, and they work fine.

What can I check and look for? I tried nslookup, but it returned a "unknown server" for a name.  I put in google's DNS at 8.8.8.8 and it registered, but would not pick up any sites either.

IS there something that would cause windows to ignore or not look at any DNS that you put in front of it?

Thanks

Just a few suggestions:





Flush your DNS cache -  "ipconfig /flushdns", in case it is goobered up.





Check your HOSTS file.





Do you now have a mixed XP build, such as a fully patched SP3 with OS drivers from an earlier install disk? You should update the build if so.





 

Info we have:



- drivers stopped suddenly

- blue screened

- borked / half done reinstall (what did you do, from one operating system to the drivers of another operating system exactly?)

- DNS doesn't work.



One of two things happened, you got infected and the infection tried to inject some stuff in your TCP/IP / networking stack and crashed it.  Or your hard drive is going bad. (Slight chance it's memory, if you have memtest86 it's worth checking.)



I'd suggest doing a hard drive check and fix from the other (the new install) operating system first.



Then, use your XP disk to boot into the recovery console and do a "repair install".  If that works, then use your new OS to migrate from the old one as you have time.



If it starts going wonky again during all this, the drive is probably bad.

I took all of the standard drivers that were installed in the new, clean install and copied them directly into the old drivers folder (windows/system32/drivers).

This made the old install boot and run with no other issues than the wierd DNS thing. I was able to play games from STEAM online and use TeamSpeak3 with no issues, but getting to a website is impossible by its address name.

The HOSTS file shows only 127.0.0.1
No other adddresses in there.

Most of the drivers were of the same date as the ones that were replaced, showing no changes from the old disk. I did save a copy of the folder before I copied them in, so I will look and see which ones were updated that are not now.

I did not remove any of the new drivers in the folder that were added since the original install, I only copied the ones that were installed on the new install, leaving the others alone.

In control panel -> administrative tools fire up event viewer.



Then fire up a browser and try to visit a web page. You may get system errors logged which can point to the problem. Any related errors may have already been logged as the system booted and tried to access the web for any updates.



It would be a good idea to run malwarebytes since this is also a symptom of an infection.