# [SOLVED] gentoo minimal cd fried my ethernet??

## neybis

downloaded live cd, burned to dvd (out of cds) and verified data. booted with default options, gave pages of errors mostly due to my Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card (as far as I could tell). dumped me to terminal, switched to second workspace, opened gentoo handbook in links, realized fdisk was having issues with my RAID so I booted into windows 7 to make sure disk management was still reading drives properly. realized windows networking kept going from red X to blue circle back and forth, back and forth. worried gentoo messed something up I booted my ubuntu 10.04 live cd and now it is doing the same thing. almost like a bad cable. tried different ports on the router and working cables, it appears to be my card. made sure green lan was disabled in bios but ethernet was enabled. updated to latest win7 drivers and bios. no luck...

did gentoo fck my onboard NIC?? any other techs here that may be able to give me some help? I've been using linux for almost 14 years and have been a pc tech for 7...caps don't look blown, system is stable. really just coincidence that my new mobo (less than 1 year old) fried onboard nic after rebooting from gentoo live cd??Last edited by neybis on Tue Oct 26, 2010 6:06 am; edited 1 time in total

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## Shining Arcanine

The CD is incapable of harming your NIC.

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## neybis

just saying, seriously?? that coincidental? was gaming online for a few hours, booted live cd, rebooted cpu, ethernet fried. wont work in gentoo live cd, ubuntu live cd, or win7. I mean im computer science graduate and long time tech I understand the unlikely hood of gentoo screwing something up but man, talk about timing? it could not be at all possible that it loaded a bad driver or something and tried something it shouldn't have??

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## aidanjt

 *Shining Arcanine wrote:*   

> The CD is incapable of harming your NIC.

 

That's not entirely true.  Remember the 2.6.27/e1000* bug which fubar'ed some Intel NICs?  The problem with modern hardware is EEPROMS/firmwares make hardware readily friable.

Unfortunately it's hard to tell whether the fault was with the Gentoo autobuild image damaging programmable logic, or a physical hardware fault.

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## neybis

should I report this to someone just in case? it seemed to have loaded the driver fine, perhaps in rebooting with links pulled up in another terminal caused it to unload properly frying the NIC??

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## neybis

it appears the issue u were talking about with the e1000* drivers corrupted the NVRAM causing mac issues. when running realteks diagnostics in win7 all tests pass but mac address loop...seems fishy. this is not an intel nic but can anyone help diagnose this issue and possibly help me get this fixed? starting to think this thread needs moved too : /

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## neybis

whoo!!! AidanJT appreciate all your help, Shining Arcanine i think we all learned a little something today.

so after some research, as stated the issue with the gentoo live cd and the e1000* series drivers was that it was corrupting the NVRAM of the NIC card. running realtek's diag tools, i noticed that the MAC loopback was failing. the PHY passed but I just so happened to come across a thread where someone was having issues with their PHY. turning the computer off and even unplugging it did no good, HOWEVER...

if the ethernet cord is plugged in and your motherboard supports WOL, even tho the computer is powered off the NIC is powered, maintaining NVRAM state. even unplugging the cable is unfortunately not enough either as your CMOS battery will keep the NIC alive as well. so whats the trick?

SOLUTION:

shut your computer completely down. flip switch to PSU or unplug power cable going to computer. unplug all ethernet cords and take out your CMOS battery. press the power button a few times and wait a few minutes so all of the electricity has time to work its way out of the board. this will force the onboard NIC to rebuild its NVRAM upon boot : ) problem solved

EDIT: hey mods, can we move this to a more relevant area? im sure this will prove useful to some and i will be willing to answer more questions to get this issue taken care of

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## aidanjt

I'm glad the comment led you in the right direction.  :Smile: 

I left a report for the mods to move the thread to K&H.

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## tomk

Moved from Off the Wall to Kernel & Hardware as requested.

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