The network location cannot be reached

I was working with an issue with an old file windows 2000 file server where some users were able to access network shares alright but some couldn’t. The ones that couldn’t could ping it ok but when trying to access file shares would get the error “The network location cannot be reached”.

After doing a quick google search on the error I discovered that this was normally at Netbios error and i followed the steps listed in various articles.

Restart the Computer Browser service

Disable the Routing and Remote access service

Ensure Netbios over TCP/IP is enabled

etc..

None of these fixed the issue. After checking the event log however I found the issue, there was another computer on the network with a duplicate name!

After removing the duplicate name computer from the network everything worked fine.