Occasionally my Ethernet port will show there is no Internet connection. But there is. Running the Windows troubleshooter doesn’t help. I updated drivers and that didn’t help. When the port is in this state, there is something weird about the configuration. If I check the drivers, it shows the current driver but then on the General tab it says no drivers are installed.
This seems to occur overnight when I am not using the machine. It so happens that I have an iDrive backup job that runs about 2:00 AM. I have not tried disabling it to see if the problem still occurs, but could this be caused by application software?
Sometimes when it gets into this state, if I do a Windows Restart it hangs and just shows “Restarting” until I power it down. After a restart, everything is fine.
This is a new build that is not quite three months old. I contacted the mobo manufacturer and after several back and forths they insist it is not a hardware problem (of course).
Motherboard: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. Z490 VISION D
Ethernet: Intel Ethernet Controller (2) I225-V (on board)
The first thing I did when this happened was to go to the Intel site and update the driver. The original driver was, I think, a generic Microsoft driver which I suspect was automatically installed by Windows. The current driver is Intel v1.0.2.6 9/22/2020.
I have had similar problems when the driver was almost, but not exactly, correct for the board. On Win10, problems with the driver being almost, but not exactly, correct for the board, are sometimes caused by automatic updates, MS issuing an update with a later version of the wrong driver.
If I get a chance, I will check to see if I have something like your specific system.
One possibility might be that the device is powering down after it’s been on for a long time. Look around in power settings to see if you can disable it.
Also, while it doesn’t fit exactly, check the actual ethernet cable.
Worst case, you could try disabling the device entirely and throwing in a cheap Ethernet card (perhaps even a USB one).
I am trying to remember back to when I first powered on this build. I had some kind of problem with it and the resolution was to use the generic Microsoft driver instead of the Intel driver, which surprisingly to me, worked. But that was three months ago and I can’t remember what the problem was. I don’t have a record of what driver I was using before I updated to the latest Intel driver this week.
I noticed there is a setting for “allow computer to turn off this device to save power” and I unchecked it. That was just since the last outage so let’s see what tomorrow brings. Interestingly that is not in the Windows power settings, only in the device configuration.
It’s not impossible, if a reboot resets the connection. Sometimes with a bad power cable you have brief intermittent outages and they add up over time, to the point where the network just stops working. Resetting your computer will start the process over again but it will eventually fail with time.
Another thing you can try, if this is still happening, is to disable then re-enable the network card. You can do that from Device Manager or the network settings. If that also fixes it then it makes this more plausible.
I tried that a couple of times hoping that I could somehow recycle it without the reboot, but when I click Disable the process hangs and never comes back.
When this happens, my connection automatically switches over to my WiFi connection. It shows that it connected to the wifi router, but with no internet connection. All other devices on wifi work fine.
I do not know what network architecture looks like on a PC but I am guessing that the port and connection to the router is one layer, and under that is another layer to manage the data flow from whatever network is connected. I am not sure that plugging in another Ethernet card will resolve that.
I may not be understanding what this is about. Occasionally, my internet connection disappears. I click on the “wave” icon (on my machine it is just to the left of the ENG icon and to the right of the battery). A window opens and the top entry is my network. I disconnect and reconnect and it has always worked.
Computers use the 7 layer OSI model that goes in order from bottom to top:
Physical
Datalink
Network
Transport
Session
Presentation
Application
(Hooray my Network+ cert training drilled that into me!)
I believe that the connection between the computer and router will happen at the datalink layer because it’s functioning as a network switch, and your router adds the network layer as it functions as a gateway to relay your packets on to other routers to get to your eventual destination.
I don’t think this helps with troubleshooting in this situation though, unless you suspect a router issue (and if your computer is the only device having problems I wouldn’t worry about the router).
You said that when your local connection fails it “switches over” to WiFi. Can you confirm that you’re not simultaneously connecting your computer to a network cable and WiFi? That can definitely cause problems. At work we configure the BIOS in systems at my agency to disable WiFi when a physical network is connected. I’ve also resolved issues in some of my older jobs by instructing people to manually disable WiFi when directly connecting to a LAN. It can confuse Windows.
Just making sure, I am not sure it would cause the behavior you’re describing but it’s definitely a bad idea.
There is a problem with the design of the standard IPV4 software interface, that it wasn’t designed for computers with more than one network interface. From the standard software It’s impossible to definitely tell which network interface traffic is going through. This leads to Windows sometimes mistakenly deciding that a network interface (Wifi, wired, VPN or whatever) has no internet connectivity. It can’t tell just by making an internet request, because if it “just” makes an internet request, it has no way of telling where that goes. So it also uses messy methods of trying to tell if the network connection is live.
Yeah, this is my vote. When I was a Unix admin, if we had a network card that was still visible to the OS but the light went out and the cable tested good; I blamed the “tranciever”, but we really didn’t do much in the way of troubleshooting it further, so it could have been any random part of the card. We usually just slapped a new network card from the parts cabinet in an available slot, moved the config over after disabling the one on the board, and never heard from it again.
Now that I know you have WiFi as well, I have an additional suggestion: try disabling the WiFi’s network interface in the advanced settings. Make sure nothing is happening with having two different network interfaces available that use the same router IP address.
I take it, BTW, that disabling power management didn’t work?
Agree completely that disabling the Wi-Fi interface is a good troubleshooting step. And that the real fix is a separate network card & permanently disable the mobo interface.
But I wonder about this:
At least on all the wired + wireless routers I’ve ever worked, the IP address range for the wired side and the Wi-Fi side are configured to be disjoint address spaces. E.g. within 192.168.1, the last octet 0-10 is wired and 20+ is Wi-Fi.
Though perhaps I misunderstood your words and you meant the IP address of the router as seen from the PC.