HPNA 2.0 Phoneline NIcs fail in AMD MB...

[deProfessional]

I've spent the past week trying to setup a Athlon 1.333 / EPOX8k7a+ W2K system (AMD 760 Chipset) with a linksys 10 meg phoneline connection. I had a VERY hard time getting it to work. I've gone through 2 motherboards and Power supplies (To confirm this wasn't an individual MB/Power related problem) and 4! linksys HPNA 2.0 phoneline nics that worked fine before the upgrade.

The scenarios seem to work like this - Install the card in a pci slot. Boot. Watch card get identified and green LED lights display on back. Make correct changes to TCP/IP settings for internet/Lan connection and reboot. System works. SHut down and reboot later - No green lights on card - or it just flickers very lightly. NO Network. Nothing.

So, I Uninstall drivers and do a redetection installation and reset ip settings. No error indications for card the drivers are reinstalled but still no green connection lights and no network.

Change PCI Slots - no effect
Remove all other PCI cards except AGP video and reinstall - no effect.

Trying different IRQ's at BIOS level (card usually sets at 11 on both bios info screen and Windows resources) NO effect. (Card stays at IRQ 11 under W2K). Twice I got the card to be recognized under W2k using a different IRQ, and then the system would not boot fully - not trully hang, but never fully boot, at the windows is starting minibox just before login. (keyboard and mouse still worked) The ONLY way around this was safe mode or REMOVING THE NIC.

Now, I can remove all 'hidden' network devices and insert one of these failed nics and either never see a green light work on it anymore - or get a w2k yellow warning (card problem - no drivers installed) after it tries to load drivers for it.

I finally got the last NIC to install correctly without blowing up on reboot last Wednesday. However, that nic died this Morning.

I'm stumped here - I think I eliminated QC issues at the component level. Why did this happen? Is there a problem at the via 686B Southbridge level that I don't know about?
Could it be the CPU? How???

 

[Jeff H]

deProfessional, yours is one of the few posts I've read concerning incompatibility between the Via 686B Southbridge and PNA 2.0. Here's our sad tale <g>!

I recently helped a friend set up an IWill KK266 / TBird 1.2G C system. All went well until he installed his Diamond HomeFree PCI card, and then it bogged down to 286-like speed. Nothing he could do would get the system to run w/ the PNA card installed. Numerous calls to Diamond finally determined that yes, there is a problem w/ PNA cards based on the Broadcom chipset and Via KT133. But, Diamond said it isn't a widespread enough problem for them to expend any energy on (gee, thanks Diamond). They did allow that a USB based PNA solution would not have this problem.

What my friend ended up doing was purchasing a Linksys USB PNA 2.0 solution, and thus far that's working OK. I'm still puzzled why we're not hearing more of this though. Are there so few PNA users out there that this issue simply isn't coming to the forefront?