Question : Connecting pc and laptop thru crossover cable: used to work before formatting

hey,

i have a dell dimension 3000 desktop machine, and a sony vaio laptop with windows xp profession on both of them. I used to connect the two of them through a crossover cable, by going to the tcp/ip advance setting and manually assigning the ip address as 10.1.1.1 and 10.1.1.2 to the two machines respectively, and it worked perfectly fine.

two weeks back i got a trojan in my desktop which made one of my drives disappear. i was able to remove the trojan, but couldnt recover the data. the only way out at that time was to format and partition my computer again, which i did. Even after the format and new windows xp installation, i was able to do these settings and it worked for a couple of days. This is when the problem started.
As soon as i connect the cable, the two computers try to connect (says trying to acquire ip address), but then the error comes "local area network: network cable unplugged". And ofcourse, i am unable to access the shared files on the computers simply by the command \\10.1.1.1 (which i used to do).

Any advise would be great.

Anuj

Answer : Connecting pc and laptop thru crossover cable: used to work before formatting

The cable should say Crossover, x-over or something. However if it worked before it should work now. If in doubt check my description of the cable above.

Are the computers still saying "says trying to acquire ip address"? This indicates they do not have a static IP address set.

I would disable the wireless cards while doing this. You should be able to get a connection with them enabled but if you get a wired connection there could be a problem with data retrieval as you will have 2 gateway addresses. For simplicity, at this point, I would disable by right clicking on the wireless cards and choose disable. It won't delete or re-configure anything, just disable.

Check each computer by going to a command prompt and running the following commands:
Ping 127.0.0.1   (will confirm TCP/IP connection to the localhost, itself, is OK)
Ping 10.1.1.1   (or 10.1.1.2 depending on the machine you are on. i.e. confirm it again can ping itself with the IP you have choosen)
Ping 10.1.1.2   (or 10.1.1.1 depending again on the the machine you are on, but try to ping the other machine.)