Bizarre Ethernet Controller Failure
Saturday, October 24, 2009 at 9:52 pm
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Sysadmin_Ed
(95 messages posted)
Hi folks,
I had something happen today that has left all of us scratching our heads. Before
working on a friend's XP machine that has an ASUS P5LD2-X/1333 mobo, I used Macrium
Reflect Free to image her hard drive.
After imaging, and before changing anything on the machine, I wanted to make sure
that the system would boot using Macrium's Linux-based rescue CD and that it would
see the image I made on a USB disk drive in case I had to restore the image, so I
rebooted the system with this rescue disk and it booted fine and it showed the image
backup existing on the USB drive, so I didn't proceed any further - that's all I
wanted to verify, (i.e., I didn't do any restore) and rebooted back to XP.
After reboot into XP, it said the network cable was disconnected. Absolutely nothing
else in the system showed any problems and I went through the usual troubleshooting
for ethernet controllers.
This ethernet controller is actually an on-board component, "Atheros L2 Fast Ethernet
10/100 Base-T Controller" not a PCI card device. It was still enabled in BIOS.
The cable was fine, the router was fine. I uninstalled the driver and had XP reinstall
it when it found "new hardware" upon reboot. It still showed in device manager as
everything was fine. There were no "link" or "activity" LEDs illuminated beside
the port on the back of the machine, and the router did not show any, either, for
that connection. Dead.
I had to go out and buy a new NIC card and install it to get network access back.
It was quite embarrasing and I think my friend thinks I broke it.
Ok, so how could booting a small Linux app bring down an on-board ethernet controller?
People that I've asked so far are saying that they think there was actually a hardware
failure and it was a coincidence that it happened when I touched the machine. I've
seen strange things happen, but this is the strangest.
What do you think? Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks!
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