No packets received

[bob,hewson]

My friend has an internet cafe with 15 machines all the same. They are assembled machines with no brand name.

The easiest way they have found to maintain the machines is to clone a drive off another when ever DeepFreeze fails to keep out a problem and a repair/install fails to fix the problem.

The machines are connected by LAN wire, through a hub to the server using a timer program.

A new computer mechanic has allowed the machines to run down and work without any virus protection, firewall or Deep freeze. needles to say, they were filled with viruses and spyware.

I cleaned one machine with 1. Trend Housecall. 2 downloaded and ran AVG free. 3 Downloaded, upgraded and ran Malwarebytes, 4 Downloaded and ran superantispyware. Did a repair/install of XP updated all the drivers and windows and then started to clone all other machines that were infected. (About 9 of 15)

The problem arose that while some of the cloned machines work well, 5 now show sending packets but receiving none. I can not ping anyone but the computer I am on. I type IPcomfig and get a flash of the dos screen then nothing. The same hard drive will work well in another PC and send and receive packets. By using a separate LAN card )the LAN is on-board on all) it works well, a "Repair' has no improvement. A diagnosis finds no fault.

I find it illogicality that 5 out of 15 motherboards would fail in the on-board LAN card in such a short time unless there is a virus that can actually harm a LAN. I have even removed the CMOS battery and ran without it to test if there was something in the CMOS.

One thing I have notices and can not get rid of with "FIXMBR", is a post on the post screen MBR error 3 on some of the HDs but they still work in some PC and not others.

The machines are all the same with XP SP3 DDR2 1Gig memory, 80Gig HD Samsung 2 mghz

I have downloaded the latest Nviria drivers (which work on most machines) and fully updated windows. Everything appears to be working except there is no packets received. It says it is connected and with a separate LAN card will work but fails with the on-board card. Remove the LAN cable and you get the message that the cable has been removed. The Internet connection comes up and says it is connected and sending packets but none received.

I have tried to explain everything I can think of, if you need more information please ask.

Bob

[TheTerrorist_75]

The only way the cloned drive would work is if all of the motherboards were identical. Otherwise you would need to install the proper drivers for each different motherboard.

[cherokeechief]

are you using a volume copy of XP, or did you use a retail version then cloned all of the hard drives from the one key?

with you using 15 machines, you should have a volume license to use the same XP cd in all of the machines. cloning one drive to use in all of the machines may be

part of the problem. if you read the EULA, you would understand, that XP takes a snap shot of the inventory. including the serial numbers of the mother board, and hard drive.

are you using multiple routers, or a router with alot of connections?

did you assign ip addresses to each machine or did you let windows select the ip addresses?

[Pete_C]

Any possiblilty mr non computer guy assigned them all fixed IP addresses so when you clone the drive you clone the ip and you cannot have two machines with same ip on the same network?

I would just go with clean setup , clean install, with proper protection. Note that it is probably a violation of the EULA to use AVG Free for this commercial purpose and you are open to a huge fine if caught. (like $125,000.00 is the reward they offer for turning someone in for corporate software violations so the fine must be bigger).

Since it is a business venture, get proper licensing and documentation and pay for it and include that in your cost calculations when you determine usage fees.

I do indeed recommend imaging; but image each machine individually to a master server , NAS, or USB drive which is then disconnected from the system. And I do recommend something like Deep Freeze so that any changes made by users revert on restart.