• "A Network Cable is Unplugged"
    5 replies, posted
THIS ONE PROBLEM HAS DONE NOTHING BUT DRIVEN ME NUTS SINCE LAST APRIL. When I lived in Vancouver I had not a single fucking problem with the networking. There was never any issues at all, even with an amazingly long run of cat 5 cable running gigabit speeds. When I moved home I ran a reinstall to clean slate the system. After that it's been nothing but grief. I can be sitting here at the machine and at random it will tell me "A Network Cable is Unplugged". Half the time my network traffic is unaffected and the notification goes away. The other half of the time though the network adapter drops everything. [IMG]http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer%20related/unplugged.png[/IMG] IRC times out, games disconnect, file transfers fail and the network icon spends a few seconds reacquiring my IP address before everything resumes back to normal. I began by replacing my network cable three times. First I cut and crimped a new length, then I used a length of pre-made cable. No go. Then I used different ports on the switch. Again no change so I bypassed the switch and went straight into the router. Still no dice. Finally I suspected the onboard ethernet on my motherboard so to fix several problems at once I replaced the entire motherboard with an identical one off ebay. [b]It didn't fix it either.[/b] Yes, I also wiggled the connections to make sure nothing was bust and reinstalled the network driver. At this point I'm almost suspicious it's XP that's the problem but I've never seen a problem cause the ethernet to shit itself like this so badly. I don't want to reinstall either.
You did install the drivers for the ethernet adapter, right? The generic drivers XP comes with probably won't run it very well. If that doesn't fix it, then you might want to invest in booting into a Linux live-cd and seeing if the problem persists there. [editline]sdf[/editline] Oh yeah, and the next time it disconnects: go check the power status of your router [I]and[/I] modem. I've had a similar problem when our six-year-old modem was randomly power cycling.
XP doesn't have the drivers for my NIC by default. If you don't have them installed, you can't use the network at all. My PC is peculiar about linux. Because I use the HD3850 for AGP, no linux driver seems to want to behave with the PCIe bridge chipset. It will just crash and burn because it thinks it's the PCI express card (but there are subtle differences). The switch and router are directly behind me. I never see any change in the lights.
Have you ever considered it being your network cable? You said you're using CAT5 for gigabit and didn't specify if the other cables are also CAT5. While CAT5 can do gigabit in REALLY short runs (I wouldn't go longer than a meter) it's definitely not rated for it. Try forcing your network card into 100BaseT mode and see if the problem continues.
That's why I used the pre-made cable. It IS rated for gigabit.
So it seems to of been....bad ram? I took two sticks that were failing Memtest out and it's quieted down a lot.
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