P5B-E Onboard Ethernet Not Found?!?

[therschbach]

My P5B-E ethernet was working fine until a few weeks ago when I called our internet provider because we were having outages. She reset the modem and wah lah....after that, my onboard internet card disappeared. The only thing in the Device manager under network adapters is the 1394 firewire card. The driver CD doesn't give an option to install the driver because it doesn't see the adapter either. When I manually run the ethernet driver installation on the CD, it says it doesn't detect an ethernet adapter and closes the installation. It's like it's completely disappeared off my board, even after a fresh format and install of XP. I also tried resetting all BIOS configs to default.

This in addition to a problem with the board taking many many (~20 - 200) button pushes to boot after a power outage, I decided to RMA after speaking to a phone tech who suggested the same after we tried several things. He didn't know what was going on either.

Well, teh board comes back today with no paperwork indicating what the problem was or what they did to solve it. I just got a board with a different SN#. It may just be the same board with a different sticker because it's doing the exact same things that it was doing before...no ethernet adapter and many button presses to boot (board's green LED is on). It just has an updated bios.

Any ideas?? This really pisses me off. I can't believe they would knowingly return a board without testing to see if they fixed the problem, but I don't know what I could be doing wrong. I didn't have a problem the first time I installed my software.

Just an idea....is it possible that a jacked up PS could cause my ethernet adapter to not work? It doesn't seem possible but I'm no expert. Please help with ideas.

 

[chookman]

I have seen power surges through the phone line effect the modem as well as any network card that is connected to it. So its possible.

Have you checked that the LAN is enabled in the BIOS?

The power issue could be a few things, something as simple as the power button on your machine being a bit dodgey, to test this you can try shorting the 2 pins that the power button is on, on the mainboard with a screw driver or something it should turn on everytime this way. It could also be a PSU problem not supplying enough current to the board, make sure all power connectors on plugged in properly including the 4/8 pin cpu power.

More specs on your system may help with further diag

 

[therschbach]

Thanks for the reply chook.

I quadruple checked to make sure the LAN was enable in Bios. To make sure I wasn't missing anything, I even reset all settings to default.

Concerning the power issue, I did try shorting the power pins but that didn't work either.

It's strange....when I took my video card out (ATI 1950X) to send the mobo in, I broke the little plastic latch on the board that holds the card in position. The board I got back has this replaced. I can't imagine them going through the trouble of replacing this which makes me think that this is indeed a new board, plus I can't imagine them giving a new serial number to a board just because it was repaired....which means that my problem is somewhere else. I can't imagine it being a RAM issue or a CPU issue right? So I'm suspecting PSU for the moment.

I'm going to try to find an open PC store today that will let me try another PSU to see if that solves my problems.

Specs:

P5B-E Mobo
2 sticks of 1gb Crucial DDR2
Core 2 Duo 6500+
Onboard audio if I can get everything working...
The PSU is a 450 Watt Antec

Quick question, could unplugging the D-plug from the PSU while the computer is on damage the PSU? I did this once when a wire got caught in the heatsink fan during boot. I didn't want to take the extra second to find the kill switch so I just pulled the plug out...

 

[therschbach]

Turns out that it was the PSU after all. Yay!