W7: Changed motherboard, NIC won't work

Meridian

Meridian

Meridian

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OK, I'm putting this here because I'm near certain it's a Windows thing, not hardware.


I've just (yesterday) upgraded rig number 3 from S775 to S1366. The only change involved was a change of motherboard, from an Abit IP35 to an Asus P6T. Before I swapped over I removed the drivers for the sounds card, and also BOINC (I use an optimised client which ran SSE3). Otherwise, the recent (day of release) install of Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium was left untouched.

I fired everything up and Windows detected all the drivers and installed them, apart from the ACPI drivers, which I installed. It installed the drivers for the wireless NIC, a Netgear WPN311, and no !s or Xs show against it in device manager. But it doesn't work. If I ipconfig /all I get no information about the card at all - it's as if it wasn't there. Pinging 127.0.0.1 gives me a big fat nothing. I cannot /renew or /release as it says a file is missing.

In Device Manager, I can disable and re-enable the card, and DM thinks it is doing this - but the card is not enabled as far as I can see. In Network and Sharing, I can change to a fixed IP address, and it will. If I reboot and check, the address is the same - but ipconfig /all still shows no card there. Interestingly (and I think this is the main clue) the wireless connection is described as "Wireless Connection 2". Well, 3 now actually after I tried the card in a different PCI slot. Booting in Safe Mode shows no "Connection 1" (although I want to go back and check that - I don't think I remembered to show the hidden devices)

If I fire up the in-built wired NIC, that works fine. Turning off the Firewall has no effect. The MAC is listed as allowable on the router. All the hardware worked just fine up until I changed m/b. I've uninstalled the drivers repeatedly (and yes, I also tried ticking the "Delete these drivers? box). Netgear don't do a W7 driver, but I tried a Vista driver and Windows Update - it installed, but didn't work. I tried the auto-loaded W7 driver and Windows Update and it updated the driver. Still didn't work though. I've re-installed the Intel chipset files. I've fiddled with BIOS options - nothing. It's not compatability: I have the same NIC on the same motherboard six feet away, and that works just fine

I had a go at the registry, but many of the keys are locked out against me. I was able to change the permissions of some, but other I couldn't even change the permissions. (Can I just wave two fingers at M$ at this point? It's my -ing computer, and I should be able to - what I like). But every reference to WPN311 was removed.


My feeling that it's linked to the original install, and whatever happened to "Connection 1", which is obviously hidden somewhere. I had a similar issue with XP Pro, whereby you seem to get just one chance to install wireless drivers. If anything goes wrong, the only way to fix it is to re-install Windows. I had the same issue with two Netgear and one Lonksys card at that time. But I really have got better things to do than re-install -ing Windows again. Especially as W7 doesn't seem to have that useful option from XP where you could do a re-install which left the progs intact but replaced all the drivers etc. W7 just shoves everything in a big -ing heap for you to sort out later.


Anyway, does anyone have some clues?

Cheers



M
 
I've gotta admit, after reading this part

Meridian said:
I've just (yesterday) upgraded rig number 3 from S775 to S1366. The only change involved was a change of motherboard, from an Abit IP35 to an Asus P6T.
Click to expand...

I just skimmed over the rest of the post. Changing the motherboard is not trivial by a long shot, so it's not surprising that the previous instance of Windows is being quirky. Have you tried reinstalling the chipset drivers?
 
A change of motherboard without a re-install of the OS? And they're not even close to similar? Aye, that'll be it then.
 
I only skim read your post, but you really should reinstall windows after a motherboard change.

And i saw you updated drivers via windows update? Those drivers seem to break a lot of NICs (they broke mine), so probably best to download the latest drivers from the manufacturers site (after you've reinstalled windows preferably :p).
 
As both chipsets are Intel, and happen to use the same driver set, the changes between motherboards are minimal. Judging by the fact that everything except the wireless NIC worked, including the wired NIC and even the RAID 0 array, I'm guessing that I was about 95% correct. Sadly the remaining 5% is the wireless card, and yes, they can cause issues. Yes, I'm aware that the correct way is a re-install: I've changed motherboards a couple of times before (and yes, sarcasm is present there).

Now, does anyone who understands NICs and Windows have any input?


M
 
What AV are you using? I had something similar with Kaspersky the other day, the culprit for me was the Kaspersky NDIS 6 Filter service, untick that the card started working. In the end I had to remove Kaspersky and do a reinstall as no matter what I did I couldn't get the Kaspersky Filter service running without doing this. I even posted on the Kaspersky forums and all they said was that's weird, shouldn't be doing that.

If you've not got Kaspersky then sorry for waffling on but it might be worth checking what services you've got running with the Network Properties for the Wifi connection.
 
Nope, not that either (NOD32), but thanks. I guess it's time for the nuclear option. It's annoying, because I'm pretty certain this is fixable. I just don't know how.


M
 
rather than using the windows driver get the latest one off the manufacturers website. irrespective whether it worked fine before, it might be a slightly different hardware revision.
 
What happens if you try and do a repair on the network connection? I was getting the message unable to bind to TCP/IP or something similar.
 
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