Cannot access the C$ on one of your Windows Server 2012 servers

Scenario:  Your server is experiencing networking issues that appear local to the Server OS.  The symptoms experienced:

  1. Although you can successfully ping the server, you cannot access the c$ or other shares hosted off the server. Your error message talks about not having the appropriate permissions AND/OR the server not being available on the network.
  2. Although you can see the network adapters in Device Manager, you cannot see the network adapters in the Network & Sharing center via control panel.

Cause:  Network Adapter Corruption

Solution:  Uninstalling and Reinstalling the network driver on the server.  Below are other troubleshooting steps that may help:

Our Troubleshooting Steps:

  1. We found EventID 10016 in the System Log.  (Microsoft-Windows-DistributedCOM)
  2. We started testing if there is corruption with the Config Key. We  deleted the Config key from the registry: HKLM/System/currentcontrolset/Control/Network/Config ,config.  This key holds all of the Network card information. Once you reboot, it creates a new key in same registry with proper settings.
  3. After reboot we found that the config key was there ,but the server lost network connection completely.
  4. We tried assigning static IP using netsh via the command prompt but that resulted in the error: Element not found.
  5. That made us believe that the network database is corrupted.
    We uninstalled the Network Drivers and network card from device manager rebooted the server.
  6. Installed the new drivers back that resulted in server to function properly.
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