I am a complete beginner in server management, however am put in a situation to manage our companies server running windows 2003. The person before me completely screwed up tons of stuff in this server (his "fix" for almost everything was to edit the registry), so there are all kinds of wierd things going on in this server.
I have recently added 4 new computers to our domain.
The first 2 computers were running windows 7 and were able to connect without a hitch at all.
The 3rd computer was a laptop that has always worked wirelessly but was never part of the domain, it connected to the domain, however even the main administrator login did not grant administrative rights. After a period of 2 days or so, this computer can now no longer log in at all, stating the error "windows cannot connect to the domain, either because the domain controller is down or otherwise unavailable, or because your computer account was not found."
The 4th computer is a brand new windows xp pro sp2 install on a clean formatted drive. After logging in, it is completely unable to connect to the domain, stating that the domain controller cannot be found, and that the DNS does not exist.
I have tried most of what I have found online on the 4th pc, including manually setting the DNS and IP of the computer, setting DNS records on the server, creating the computer and the user under SBSusers on the server in advance.
The problem PC's cannot ping the server by IP or hostname. All other pc's on our network (about 20) work properly.
Best Answer
Edit: I missed the part where you say the client can't ping the DC by IP address. You have a routing or a switching problem or a client configuration problem, not an Active Directory problem.
All domain joined client computers should point to the domain controllers (and nothing else) as their DNS servers.
It sounds like you're not doing this on the problem machines.
Rule number one for troubleshooting AD problems is: it's always DNS
Rule number two is: if it's not DNS, look again, you missed the DNS problem.