Thursday, August 29, 2013

IP address already assigned to another adapter

This issue occurs if a network adapter with the same IP address is in the Windows registry but is hidden in the Device Manager (My Computer > Properties > Hardware > Device Manager). This hidden adapter is called a ghosted network adapter.

  • You may see this if you recently performed a P2V and the resulting virtual machine still has the physical NICs and drivers for those NICs present. These ghost NICs have the old IP address and the virtual NIC cannot be assigned the same IP address.

Using the Show hidden devices option in the Device Manager (View > Show hidden devices) does not always show the old virtual NIC (ghosted adapter) to which that IP Address is assigned.
 
To resolve this issue, make the ghosted network adapter visible in the Device Manager and uninstall the ghosted network adapter from the registry:
  1. Click Start > Run.
  2. Type cmd and press Enter.
  3. At the command prompt, run this command:
    Note: In Windows 2008 and Windows 7, open the command prompt using the Run as Administrator option.

    set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
    Note: If this command does not work (a possibility in Windows Server 2000 and 2003), you may need to add the parameter to Windows and set its value:

    1. Right-click the My Computer desktop icon and choose Properties.
    2. Click the Advanced tab and select Environment Variables.
    3. In the System variables section, click New.
    4. Set the Variable name to devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices and set the Variable value to 1 to enable the parameter.
    5. Click OK to add the variable to Windows.
  4. Start the Device Manager by running this command from the same command prompt:

    start devmgmt.msc
  5. Click View > Show Hidden Devices.
  6. Expand the Network Adapters tree (click the plus sign next to the Network adapters entry).
  7. Right-click the dimmed network adapter, then click Uninstall.
  8. Once all of the grayed out NICs are uninstalled, assign the IP address to the virtual NIC.

    Note: To assign the IP address to the virtual NIC on the command line, run the command:

    netsh interface ip set address "Local Area Connection #" static IP_Address Subnet_Mask Default_Gateway

    For example:

    netsh interface ip set address "Local Area Connection 2" static 192.168.1.101 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1

  9. Close the Device Manager
Source of this article: VMware KB1179 

2 comments:

  1. Never encountered such a problem but good to learn a trick which can benefit me in future.Thanks for sharing

    Regards
    Silvester Norman

    Change MAC Address

    ReplyDelete