re: Bizarre Ethernet Controller Failure
Sunday, October 25, 2009 at 6:09 am
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Ricer46
(22035 messages posted)
It's a coincidence. I once replaced a cpu on a mobo, never got near the HD, and low
and behold, the HD was dead on reboot. Fortunately the friend never kept any real
data. Sometimes the stress of turning off and on a device, can send it over the edge.
On Saturday, October 24, 2009 at 9:52 pm, Ed Meadows wrote:
>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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