Friday, February 17, 2012

IPCONFIG–An internal error occurred: The request is not supported.

I helped to troubleshoot a laptop (running Windows XP with SP3) which was having problem getting IP address.  The laptop was not able to get IP address and I got the following error when I ran ipconfig.

Windows IP Configuration
An internal error occurred: The request is not supported.
Please contact Microsoft Product Support Services for further help.
Additional information: Unable to query host name.

ipconfig error

Checking the system event log revealed the cause of the problem.

The DHCP Client service failed to start because of TCP/IP Protocol Driver service failed to start.  The DHCP Client service was indeed stopped as shown in the Services console.

DHCP failed

The next entry showed that the TCP/IP Protocol Driver service failed to start because the IPSEC driver service failed to start.

tpc ip driver cannot start

Finally, the next entry gave the reason why IPSEC driver service failed to start.  The system cannot find the file specified.

ipsec missing

To view the status of the TCP/IP Protocol Driver service and IPSEC driver service, go to Device Manager, click on View menu and enable Show hidden devices.

Show hidden devices

On the right pane, expand Non-Plug and Play Drivers.  Looks for TCP/IP Protocol Driver and IPSEC driver.

TCP IP Protocol Driver

IPSEC driver failed

As shown in the above pictures, TCP/IP Protocol Driver and IPSEC driver are having some issues.

The properties page of TCP/IP Protocol Driver and IPSEC driver showed that both services were stopped.  Furthermore, the Driver Details button on the IPSEC driver properties page was greyed out.  This was because the IPSec.sys file was missing from the C:\Windows\system32\drivers folder.  I copied the missing IPSec.sys file from another machine, rebooted the laptop and the problem was solved.

2 comments:

Practice Safe Sectors! said...

Thanks for posting this. Without people like you fishing out the real problem, people like me would be left with nothing to do but reload windows

kaos142 said...

So helpful, and so much appreciated. I rarely come across something I can't fix but this one had me really stumped.

Thank you!