I?m having difficulty getting ME to log onto our NT domain. Many of our staff will be using laptop computers as their primary workstation. The laptop has a PCMCIA NIC card for when users are away from the office. When in the office, the laptop isin a docking station, which also has a NIC card. Windows seems to only utilize whichever NIC was the last to be installed when attempting to log onto our NT domain network.
The laptops are running Windows ME. Two hardware profiles exist, “dock1” and “undocked”, and the PCMCIA card is disabled in the ‘dock1’ profile. Workstations are configured for dynamic IP. At startup, we initially log into an NT domain (NT 4) which then runs the logon scripts mapping drives etc.
As an example, the laptop is placed in the networked docking station and booted. The first prompt the user sees is the error “no domain server exists to verify your account” (not exact syntax). By acknowledging the error and canceling the password dialog, Windows starts up fine. Once booted, I can see that the laptop did get an IP address. I can browse the web and even see other systems on the domain. The only thing affected is logging into the NT domain. This seems to happen if the PCMCIA NIC was the last of the two NIC’s configured and whether or not the PCMCIA NIC is physically in the laptop.
The reverse is also true, if the docking station NIC was last to be configured and the laptop is undocked and using the PCMCIA NIC, the same error occurs. (Yes, the NT domain parameters are set correctly). This ‘last card installed’ seems to be the more common scenario but may not be absolute. I have some laptops that will not log into the NT domain either docked or undocked without reinstalling either or both NIC?s.
I did check the obvious such as is the domain server being available, NIC being properly installed and configured, etc….
