Network Path Not Found

We’re spinning up Windows 2008 R2 Standard servers from templates in our vCloud environment and begin to notice a problem. We can’t join them to a working domain.

Network Path Not Found is the error we got when we attempted to join the domain.

After some troubleshooting, we think it might be DNS issues… but everything works. After further investigation we notice that the service TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper is set to Automatic – but is not running. Attempts to start it, fail.

Nothing around the net is helpful – so we start tearing apart a working server. The one registery key related to the TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper is different.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\NetBT

Start Value should be set to 2 instead our broken server was set to 4.

This also solved the event log entry:

Service Control Manager (7001 – None): The TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper service depends on the NetBT service which failed to start because of the following error: The service cannot be started either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it.