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2 identical computers. Power supply went out in one of them and it was crucial to get the computer up and running within minutes. Put the dead computer's hard drive into the good computer with working power supply and everything appeared to work fine.

However, the shared scanner that everyone uses ... the smb folder path's no longer worked. It kept saying invalid network folder path.

e.g. smb:\name-of-pc\shared\path

The computer name never changed. The only way I could get it working again was to use the IP of the computer instead of the computer name.

Why is this?

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  • Without more info, it's hard to say. If the network is DHCP, and the IP address changed because there's a new MAC on the adaptor is different, it's possible that the DNS for your local network never updated the address the system was at, so clients can't find it by name. Have you tried some basic troubleshooting like pinging the server by name to see if it resolves and answers properly? Sound like this belongs on SU as well, based on your tags.
    – MagnaVis
    Aug 24, 2017 at 15:37

1 Answer 1

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This is not related to SMB but to DNS or WINS. If the share was referred with \\hostname.example.com\share, it's DNS, while \\hostname\share would have been resolved using WINS.

It takes some time for DNS or WINS to update, even when it's dynamic on an Active Directory domain. That's because also the clients have DNS cache. You may check that the DNS is updated. Additionally, you may run ipconfig /flushdns on every client to clear DNS cache.

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