Ping Sweep

Ping Sweep

If you are undetermined about your target and just want a live system, ping sweep is the solution for you. Ping sweep also uses ICMP to scan for live systems in the specified range of IP addresses. Though Ping sweep is similar to ping but reduces the time involved in pinging a range of IP addresses. Nmap (http://www.insecure.org) also contains an option
to perform ping sweeps.

Tracert: 

 Tracert is another interesting tool available to find more interesting information about a remote host. Tracert also uses ICMP.
Tracert helps you to find out some information about the systems involved in sending data (packets) from source to destination. To perform a tracert follow the procedure below.

Tracer connects to the computer whose IP has been entered and reveals all stations starting from your Internet connection. Both the IP address as well as the domain name (if available) is displayed.

If PING cannot reveal a name, Traceroute will possibly deliver the name of the last or second last station to the attacker, which may enable conclusions concerning the name of the provider used by the attacker and the region from which the attacks are coming.

Go to DOS prompt and type tracert <destination address> 

 (For example: tracert yahoo.com).

But there are some tools available like Visual Traceroute which help you

even to find the geographical location of the routers involved.

http://www.visualware.com/visualroute