LanParty SLi-DR NIC missing...

[evilsaint]

Well, after some thorough searching and tweaking of anything and everything in the BIOS and XP, I still can't find my nVidia NIC whatsoever, in Windows, safe-mode or regular, or in BartPE when I boot off the CD.

It has power going to it on the board, because the link light comes on when I plug a CAT-5 cable into it, but nothing happens at all, not even any network activity like on the Marvell NIC before I installed it's drivers but plugged in a cable. Windows doesn't pop up any warnings/baloons, no new devices show up in Dev. Mgr., and no new network connections show up in MNP.

The only troubleshooting conclusion that the guys over at DFI-Street could come up with that I haven't tried yet is flashing the BIOS, which i'll try pretty soon, but does anybody here have any ideas? The previous owner of the board exclusively used this NIC; when I got the board, the first thing I did was reset the bios to defaults and configure it to my preferences.

 

[evilsaint]

Ok, because nobody seems to want to read through the whole post, here's some Cliff's :

Two NIC's on the motherboard, Marvell and nVidia.
Both are enabled in BIOS; both show a link light when ethernet is plugged in, only Marvell shows activity.
Marvell shows up in Windows, works like a charm. NV is nowhere to be found, not even when I manually search for new devices.
Tried DFI nVidia NIC drivers, and actual nVidia drivers; their install programs both say that an NV NIC is not present.

So any ideas? Anything that you even think might be helpful is probably something that the guys at DFI-Street and myself haven't thought of, so it stands to reason that that idea could help out immensely.

 

[grooge]

You did a fresh windows install when you got this board?

 

[evilsaint]

Re-partitioned my SATA2 system drive, *fully* formatted both of the new partitions (no NTFS quick-format BS), installed a clean, fresh copy of XP Pro w/ SP2 slipstreamed onto it (it's a stable copy that i've used many, many times before) and completely cleared the BIOS; I even dumped the saved configs in the little DFI BIOS feature that lets you save two individual configs along with the board defaults even while you take out the CMOS battery and switch the jumper over.

In other words, I started completely fresh, almost even so hardware wise. The only HW that I re-used in this mostly-new rig were my hard-drives, RAM and case which are all, quite obviously, neglible in terms of causing this problem.

 

[grooge]

And you are sure that LAN is enabled in BIOS?

 

[evilsaint]

Of course, my furry friend. Both of 'em. Hell, I tried turning both of them off and on to make sure that the BIOS options were functioning properly, and at a minimum, when I disabled the Marvell one, it dissapeared in Windows. The setting to disable the NV one is a bit vague (DFI products, wording, etc... are *VERY* Japanese ), and there's another setting that i've played around with to change the MAC addy for the NIC , but all of it has still made no difference.

 

[evilsaint]

TTT... any other suggestions?

 

[reidman]

I had this problem with a DFI NF4 after I updated the bios, never did get the Lan back had to return for a new board. New one has been great for a year now. Could be a bad motherboard.

 

[Arcanedeath]

Make sure the MAC address shows up in the Bios, sometimes when you flash the bios of the DFI board you can lose the Nvidia card's MAC address and this can sometimes cause what your describing, in older bios versions (like 3/10) their is an option to enter in the MAC address for the NIC, its normaly located on a sticker near the rear pannel ports. See if entering (or rentering if allready present) in a MAC addy helps.