Hi there,
I've got an odd situation that's got me stuck for solutions. I've spent about an
hour researching on the net but have found nothing that helps.
I hibernated my laptop... as I often do.
The following day I tried to resume it and it hung. The bar that shows the progress
of restoring from hibernation got to the end and stopped. I tried to restore about
3 times and each time it failed. So I then selected to delete the restore data and
reboot XP (after the first failure XP was giving me a text menu asking if I want
to try and restore again or just reboot normally).
When I rebooted I had no network access.
The little network monitor icon in the system tray was showing that I was connected
to a network but in fact it was not connected and unplugging it would make no difference
to its "connected" status. The lights on the network port on the laptop were not
blinking and the Hub was not indicating that anything was plugged into that port.
The connection properties were showing that there was in fact no real connection...
the card had been assigned a default internal IP address that usually comes into
the picture when a network connection is present but the DHCP server (the router)
can't be accessed (such as if my firewall is incorrectly configured and blocking
the connection to the router). In this case I disabled the firewall and the problem
persisted. Reboot after reboot.
I figured the drivers had become corrupt somehow.
I uninstalled the network adapter drivers.
When I try to reinstall them the install hangs at the point where it tries to create
a system restore instance. It seems that system restore is not working either. I've
tried to restore an instance that was automatically created about a week ago (system
restore worked fine then) when I removed a bunch of software but again it would hang.
In safe mode I managed to perform a restore but it made no difference to my networking
issue.
This is not a hardware issue as I have a spare harddisk with a clean install of XP
on it and if I boot the computer off that harddisk then networking is just fine.
I'd like to reinstall the network adapter drivers and see whether it starts to work
again... but I can't because System Restore seems to have also died and it won't
let me install new hardware (due to hanging). I've also tried reapply SP1 (I don't
use SP2 at this time) and I can't do that either because again System Restore hungs
the install when trying to create a restore point.
Does anyone have any bright ideas?
Thanks a lot...
Jonathan
Network driver crashed. Can't update due to system restore issue
Linear Mode
