Messed Up TCP/IP Stack

I’m blogging this for all the folks in the future who did the same stupid thing I did.

The other weekend I messed up my TCP/IP stack trying to install an iPhone update. Turns out the iPhone updater conflicts if you have ever installed at AT&T wireless card.

What happened was that my iPhone was getting stuck in the Verifying iPhone Software phase while updating my firmware. In an attempt to fix the problem I followed the recommendation on this discussion board only to accidentally delete the wrong reg key. Instead of deleting one key/value pair I deleted:

My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters

Whoops! It turns out there is lots of important info stored there.

To solve the problem so I didn’t have to sheepishly go to my IT folks and tell them what I did I:

  1. Tried to do a system point restore only to have all my restore attempts fail. Bizarro and quite unfortunate.
  2. Spent countless hours doing things that didn’t fix the problem like resetting my TCP/IP stack with netsh or running ipconfig which told me “The system cannot find the file specified.” (Which definitely puzzled me).
  3. Removed each network interface device in Device Manager and then rebooted. Windows would then re-install the driver on reboot.
  4. Re-installed the TCP/IP driver for each network interface device:
    1. Go to Network Connections
    2. Right click on the network connection you want to work on
    3. Click properties
    4. Click install
    5. Click protocol
    6. Click have disk
    7. For the directory put c:\windows\inf
    8. Pick Microsoft as your manufacturer
    9. Pick Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)
    10. Manually updated my machine name in the registry
    11. Hostname and NV Hostname under parameters
This entry was posted in Random. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *