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How to find MAC address of 'invisible' hardware?

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4wd:
The first thing I would do is disable the router WiFi during all testing since that will eliminate any outside possibilities and immediately prove it into the WiFi or cable side.

Is the Win7 PC connected via WiFi or cable?  If WiFi, connect via cable to test.

And since you only listed four units that are static IP, change them all to DHCP and see if the problem still exists.

If it's gone, then change half of them back to static, see if still happens and so on, until they're all back on static.

Had to do a right-click on the IP in SoftPerfect to get it to tell me the MAC address.
--- End quote ---

Set Options->Program Options->Additional->Resolve MAC address, IIRC, to have it show up normally during a scan.

Does a PC have a multiple NIC that's been assigned an IP somehow?

I still recommend the easiest way to find the problem is to disable WiFi and unplug cables until the problem goes.

Shades:
Yep, I'm totally in agreement with 4wd. Elimination is the most sure way of finding the culprit.

f0dder:
Doesn't work with f0dder usually because he lives in a different plane of existence where there is no time.-4wd (June 12, 2009, 07:58 PM)
--- End quote ---
Hah :P

<nitpick>PS: there's no such thing as a dos box on NT-based Windows. Call it a shell, command prompt, console, whatever - but please not a dos box.</nitpick>

Stoic Joker:
Not all DHCP servers (like the ones included in most routers) are that discriminating about skiping statically assigned IP addresses (conflict detection). Another way to work this is to run arp -a to see what Win7 is seeing, and then use one of the many MAC address lookup sites to see who made the problem device (First 3 octets of MAC address is a vendor ID) which will narrow the search faster.

On large or busy networks this would be easier then randomly unplugging stuff (which tends to form a crowd of spastic end users).

You may have a device with 2 IPs from an old/test config that is playing peek-a-boo ... I've done that too myself once or twice.

barney:
OK,
Let me try this again.  This is not a hardware issue, per se.  I'm aware of the methodologies broached and had tried most of them prior to my plea for help. 

This is a multi-boot system.  Windows 7 RC is reporting an IP conflict.  The event viewer purportedly shows the MAC address of the other device with the duplicated IP address.  That device does not physically exist in this building, much less in the network.  (For what it's worth, the MAC address resolves to High Tech Computer Corp, out of Taiwan.)  An ARP scan is useless.  An IPconfig scan properly identifies present devices.  Software scans report the errant MAC address.  This happens in Windows 7 RC.  It does not happen in any flavour of Linux on this system (Ubuntu, a few others).  It does not happen in WinXP MC Edition, SP3.

What I would like to do is to locate the Windows 7 source for this non-existent device and either edit or delete it so that the error stops popping up an alert box.

To my mind, at this stage there are only two possibilities remaining:  a false entry somewhere in Windows, or an intrusion into the wireless system.  I have elements in place to alert me of attempted intrusions.  I do receive such alerts.  I suppose it's possible that some hotshot pirate could still get into the wireless system unbeknownst to me, but the likelihood of said hotshot using the same IP address I'm using and only attaching to the network when I'm using Win7 stretches coincidence beyond my belief limits.

That leaves a bogus record, which I would dearly like to find, somewhere in Win7.

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