Yesterday I was uninstalling some unwanted software and I must have absentmindedly deleted something that was important, because immediately after my internet connection stopped functioning.
I opened my device manager and noticed that there’s an unknown device under Other Devices called Ethernet Controller. I open the device details and try to search for a driver, but nothing can be found on my PC. If I uninstall it Windows will find it after it boots up, but its unable to locate a driver for it.
My network device is built in to my nVidia nForce motherboard. My computer came with the nForce driver setup file nForce_x16_6.82_winxp2k_english.exe . I’ve never updated it. I ran the setup file which includes Ethernet drivers and reinstalled everything. I rebooted, but it still finds an unknown Ethernet Contrtoller.
I downloaded the newer 6.86 nForce drivers on my other computer and transfered it over. Installed it, same problem.
Right now my device manager looks like this:
Network adapters:
1394 Net Adapter
NVIDIA nForce Networking Adapter
Other devices:
Ethernet Controller (yellow !)
I’ve uninstalled them and reinstalled them a billion times. It says my local area network is unplugged, but it’s not.
My PC is a Mach V from Falcon Northwest. I called their tech support yesterday but they haven’t gotten back to me yet. I’m going nutty without any internet connected to it.
I might have accidently uninstalled something called Miniport Driver something. I’m not sure what it was :smack: I think that’s what’s giving me my troubles.
The Miniport driver is part of a package from Via. It can hose a system and practically did mine once.
It wasn’t clear if you unistalled the adapters and the controller from the device manager all at once and then did a hardware scan. If not, try that. You may have some registry problem because of it. Unistall the Miniport drivers if you can.
I uninstalled the Miniport driver before any of this happened, it’s what I thought caused the problems. Should I reinstall it? Where is it and what is it?
I tried uninstalling the network components at the same time and doing a hardware scan as you suggested. It finds the NVIDIA nForce network adapter and the 1394 adapter (whatever that is) but it still cannot find the mystery Ethernet Controller.
Hiya. Can you tell us whether you have two Ethernet ports on the computer? I have seen many motherboards with the Nvidia chipset which have both an Nvidia ethernet and a 3rd party.