How Does PING work

I am not sure exactly what it is you want to know or what problem you are having. If you ping an other computer, your computer sends a packet to that computer. If that computer is connected to the network and turned on, it will receive the ping packet. If the other computer (or an intervening firewall) is not set to reject pings, the other computer will respond to the ping and let your computer know the ping was received and and your computer will recorde what the round trip time was.

to answer your question it really depends what command you issue when you ping

thus if you trying to ping 'computername' it will first try to resolve that name to an IP using what methods are open to it, IE DNS, WINS, host, broadcast etc it will do this BEFORE it trys to communicate with the device. If however you type ping IPADDRESS with no switches then it will simple attempt to send 4 packets to that IP address.

In reality your question is a combination of how PING works and how name resolution works

if the record is still in DNS or host file and the remote computer is powered off.

then I use:

Ping -a computername
would this give me the IP address of the remoter computer, since it has a DNS record for it ??

Ping Ipaddess
would this give me the remoter computer name , since it has a DNS record for it?

Pinging by name should give you the IP address. Pinging by IP address will not give you the name.

If you want the name from the IP address for someplace on the internet, go to http://network-tools.com/ click on the radio button beside LOOKUP and type in the IP address.

you use ping -a to obtain the address when pinging an IP address, you can do this for both remote and local addresses providing you have a DNS server configured on your client machine

strung:
<<<Pinging by name should give you the IP address. Pinging by IP address will not give you the name. >>>

where does it get the Ip address from???? from the DNS??? if so why it doesn't get the name when you ping the IP??

If you look at Gevybecca's post above and my reply, you will see that I was wrong and it will work both ways.

Gevybecca is right (although ping -a appears to work even if the DNS server is not on your local machine). Learn something new every day!

By the way, why don't you just try it yourself and see?

the point of my question is what is involved during the PING operation.
if  the remote computer is powered off, and you ping it , would the PING go the DNS and retrieve any information or it will just send a request to the powered off computer and will receive a time out.
I want sort of  a Road Map of the PING command.

You are still missing the point of my question:
if  the remote computer is powered off, and you ping it , would the PING go to the DNS and retrieve any information or it will just send a request to the powered off computer and will receive a time out.
I want sort of  a Road Map of the PING command.

so the PING Tries to communicate with the remote machine then to DNS  or to DNS then to the remote machine?

can anyone  answer this:

the PING Tries to communicate with the remote machine then to DNS  or to DNS then to the remote machine?

any updates ??????