Win 98 Dlink Lan Card Driver Install

[DaveU]

Have a couple old pc's which
I reformatted and want to set up a small
2 pc lan for some older gaming head to head
old dell 450, installed an old dlink lan card DFE TX+
rebooted and found new hardware wizard
have the right drivers and all, but
i just can't seem to get the thing to take the drivers,
just keeps telling me can't find the right drivers.
tried downloading new, tried floppy that came with the lan card
tried manual install lan card, and still wont take the drivers.
tried 3 different PCI slots. just wont take any drivers...

Is the Lan card bad? thanks for the thoughts/help...

 

[jackschmittusa]

As I recall, Win98 sometimes had issues with nics not being installed in busmaster slots. Try installing it in the top pci slot. In device manager, select the nic, properties, driver, update driver, and even if it tells you it's not the right driver for your hardware, choose to install anyway. Make sure the files are unzipped, and you point to the correct location, including subdirectories.

 

[DaveU]

thanks, I'll give it a try and let you know.
I don't have the option to install the driver anyway though
if it doesn't recognize the drivers I can force the install

 

[DaveU]

Well, using the top PCI slot didn't make any difference.
any other suggestions?

 

[jackschmittusa]

Do you ever let Windows finish installing whatever drivers it wants (just uncheck all the sources for where to look for a driver), then try to update?

 

[Dahak]

one thing that I always do on a windows 98 install is install the motherboards, chipset drives then install any drivers for devices after that. Also ive seen with dlink's cards it can be picky on which drivers it wants. you can try downloading them from either www.dlink.com or www.dlink.ca, and they are differnet drivers as well.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Important question - *which* DLink NICs do you have? They make quite a few, with similar model names/numbers, but different internal "revisions", that use different chipsets. LinkSys does this as well.
If the problem is a chipset/driver mis-match, then force-installing the drivers will do no good, and could possibly cause system crashes.

If this is Win98, then try booting into Safe Mode, and delete all of the NICs that you see there. Reboot, and then see if it will take the drivers (assuming that they are the correct ones).

If nothing else, I've seen sometimes Win9x get screwed up with it's adaptor and protocol bindings, and the only solution is to delete *everything* out of the network properties, and then start installing them anew.