Problems installing Realtek 100Mbps NIC

leeroybrown

I bought a MRi 10/100 Mbps Ethernet NIC recently.

This NIC uses the Realtek 8139 chipset.

When I try to install it in the PC under Win2k (SP2) it gives an error during driver installation and the card is not installed. I've re-tried the installation loads of times. Reseated the card in two different PCI slots. Each time I uninstalled the card in win2kpro before shutting down and reseating and reinstalling. I've tried two different win2kpro driver versions (The ones on the floppy supplied and the ones on the mri homepage www.mri.co.uk).
but have had no luck.The card also appears to install successfully in my Red Hat 7.1 install.

I got the retailer to check the card and it installed properly for them using the driver disk supplied so the NIC seems to be OK.

I know one person who has exactly the same NIC installed under win2kpro (Unsure of which Service Pack they are using) without any problems.

I'll give it a go with the reference drivers for win2k from the realtek homepage but if I don't find a fix soon it'll have to be a reformat and re-install.

Mountjoy Mugger

I installed mine with Win 2k, SP 1 (using the generic Realtek driver) - SP 2 was installed later, and thru Windows Updates, I was advised that a newer driver was available. The new driver didn't work, so I reverted back to the generic one that Win2k had - no problems since.

leeroybrown

Looks like a reformat and reinstall.

Bloody windows!

JustHalf

Use the default driver. Uninstall all drivers for the card, and reboot. Pick the Windows 2000 default driver when prompted.

leeroybrown

I've already tried that.

When I originally installed the NIC I used the driver packaged with Win2k. This one didn't work and all my subsequent attempts involved uninstalling the NIC and Drivers before a reboot.

Mountjoy Mugger

Have you tried uninstalling SP2 and then installing the NIC?

leeroybrown

No,

Maybe that might work and I did think about it, but I'm not 100% sure what uninstalling a Service Pack and reinstalling would do for system stability.

I suppose it might be worth a try. It might save me the the huge amount of time required to reinstall everything from scratch anyway.

Mountjoy Mugger

Not sure myself

All I know is I had no prob with an identical card and Win 2k SP1 - make sure you have the SP ready to save you time d/ling again.

Oh - one more thing - try and delete any *.inf that might be floating around relating to it.

leeroybrown

I've got SP2 on my HDD, but my I have my Win2kpro CD left elsewhere ATM.

I've already deleted (well copied to floppy) the INF files for the NIC although there is probably one there remaining from my last failed installation.

Gerry

I have had 1 or 2 problems with these cards, try picking a driver which has a different letter after the 8139 , ie switch from 8139A to 8139C or vice versa. Also try moving the card into a different pci slot, they are extremely picky.

po0k

Its a 8139C afaik.
I had it running on SP2 no bother. Was sitting in my system with a 8029 10MBit card and i was able to switch between em (the 10MBit would only worjk for games for some reason and the 100MBit for file transfers) with out any problems.
Course my Win2k has gone tits up now.
Serious problems wioth browsing CDs. Won't let me read more then two-3 directories down. I think it's something to do with UDMA.
The drive isa Plextor161040A, and can suport UDMA33 with the supplied jumper hack. Win2kPRO had no problems with using it before, then i went to GL2 (and used Clone CD constantly) and the thing reverted back to PIO4.
Have it running in Win98SE now. No probs so far. Just hate 98. Only using it for games really.
Must get around to buying that second hard drive...

leeroybrown

Tried the rather dodgy business of removing SP2 and then installing the NIC, and still no luck.

SP2 is now re-installed and the system still seems to be poretty stable.

I'll try to get a few more driver versions.