Suddenly, both my FireTVs can't connect to Win 7 file host

[Thenin]

I've set aside a home-built desktop box for hosting about 12-15 TB of movies and TV shows and general videos that I very frequently watch using Kodi 16 with my two full Fire TV gen 2's (not sticks) via wired Ethernet. I simply share the five separate drive's media folders via standard Windows sharing.

This has worked quite well for at least four years, but all of a sudden, Kodi 16 on bothof my Fire TVs cannot access any of any of the file drive's media! And the only thing I did was to perform a full clone of my system disk to a backup disk just before this started failing - I made no other changes.

I've rebooted five times, and I can connect to all the media drives and media files perfectly from all my other Windows computers on my home Ethernet LAN. I've also rebooted the router a couple of times. When that didn't work, I decided to stop using OpenDNS and switched back to the default, but that didn't help either.

What's going wrong, and how do I correct this extremely and horribly frustrating problem?

Thanks!

 

[samuria]

DNS isn't used on local network so changing that won't help. You say you cloned the disk did you then remove the cloned copy or you will have two disks the same which will confuse the system

 

[Thenin]

DNS isn't used on local network so changing that won't help. You say you cloned the disk did you then remove the cloned copy or you will have two disks the same which will confuse the system

Thanks, samuria. That's an astute observation, but I've confirmed that the cloned partition has a different volume GUID / "uniqueid" than the original, and thus the cloned volume is not shown as offline by Disk Management. But I went ahead and removed the clone's drive letter and tried connecting with Kodi again, but there was no improvement.

But thanks for your reply!

 

[Thenin]

Well, they can't connect to ANY of my Windows computers on my LAN, so what I did on the main host is clearly irrelevant. Therefore, this isn't a Windows problem at all, but rather a Fire TV / Kodi problem...

 

[Thenin]

I marked this thread "unsolved" because this may very well be a Windows 7 networking problem after all.

See, for example: Patch Tuesday updates for Win7, KB 4480970 and KB 4480960 knock out networking

So I uninstalled that update, rebooted, and tried again. No luck, but we still can't exclude a Windows issue since I haven't changed anything at all on my FireTVs or the Kodi software installed on them.

Does anyone have any troubleshooting suggestions, please?

Thanks!