Failed connection when attempting to connect to Windows Vista PC from OS X Mavericks

Not sure that you've tried it this way so

1. do you know the IP address of the win machine? If not, go start, run, cmd and type ipconfig. You're looking for four numbers separated by periods eg 192.168.3.4
2. once you have that, do another connect to server in Finder but this way: smb://<IP address> (replace <IP address> with the real thing)
3. if that doesn't work, try connect to server, cifs://<IP address>
4. if 2 or 3 works, try replacing the IP address with the win machine's name again
5. reply with results please

Ok, do you have any folders actually shared? Turning on file sharing is needed but having a share folder is also. On the windows machine, pick a folder you want to share, right-click, sharing tab and complete information, making sure that the right users have the right access. Even if you did have a folder shared before, this is worth a try.

Ok, next thing to do on the mac is open Console (in Applications > Utilities), note the current time and attempt to connect to the windows machine. when you get the error, switch back to Console, hopeful;y there aren't too many messages from the time you started the connection until you went back to Console; copy / paste the messages into a reply but if there are duplicates, please remove them before posting.

Not really 🙂, AFP won't work anyways. Ok, can you reply with the following information for both the win and mac machines:

• ip address
• subnet mask
• default gateway
• dns server

Message was edited by: SilverSkyRat: more info

Ok, that all looks fine and I presume there's no problem with internet access and yes, 254 in your case would be the router. DNS server should also be set at 192.168.1.254, but that's not going to affect our current issue.

(For future reference, DNS setting can be seen this way (amongst others):

Mac: System Preferences > Network

and Win Vista: Network & Sharing Center > View status > Details

But back to our problem... could you please verify a few things:

1. The setup of public folder sharing (Network & Sharing Center): set the middle option:

and password protected sharing off:

2. Please also turn off firewalls on both the Win and Mac machines

3. On the Mac, open Terminal (Applications > Utilities) and type ping -c 4 192.168.1.71

4. If that works, type ping -c 4 jdnotebook.local

5. If that works, use Finder to connect to server but this time use smb://jdnotebook.local (even though password protected sharing is off, you still might need to supply your registered user name and password (do verify those on your Win machine, and preferably supply an admin user account from the Win machine in the Finder "Connect As" box)

Correction to point 5: I still hadn't turned off password protected sharing on my vista machine so you should be fine in Finder to "Connect As" Guest 🙂

reply with results please

Message was edited by: SilverSkyRat: Correction

Hi Donna, on the Vista machine, could you please verify the computername in Control Panel > System?

and reply with the info please

haha, i was typing just after you 🙂 Glad to hear it's now all well, unfortunately a long (but good) lesson learned about being up to date eh?

I have had a similar problem on occasions, although the Windows end was running 2003. My issue was caused by the clock on the Windows machine being wrong. Presumably, the Mac considers this some kind of security risk, but instead of giving any useful hints, it just refuses to connect.

Anyway, ensuring that the clock on the Windows machine is 'correct' fixes it. (I guess this also depends on the clock on the Mac being correct too!). In my case the Windows clock was wrong because a) it's old, and b) I had a power cut.

Although "TheWrinklie's" problem went away, I'm putting this in case it was the actual fix, and in case it's useful to anyone else.