Bizarre aversion to network cards

[weckart]

My MDD has a strange allergy to ethernet. It has an onboard Gb ethernet controller, which is recognised as working in System Profiler. It shows automatically in the Networking Prefpane with a MAC address but suffers from the perma-cable unplugged syndrome. No biggie, it happens. A surge could have fried something or other.

The MDD came with a Netgear fast ethernet card in situ. Driver was loaded but the same situation obtained. No matter what cable I plugged in, the card wouldn't see anything. So I swapped slots. Then I got a DGT-528 Gb card, and installed the latest drivers. System Profiler said no driver loaded. Third time lucky, I got an NC7770 Netburst Extreme card, which uses the same BCM5701 chip as the onboard ethernet controller. This time I had to add the Vendor and Device IDs. Reboot. No driver loaded.

Am I missing something somewhere? Never had this sort of problem before. I did install a Broadcom Airport compatible 802.11g card. That worked immediately, so the networking stacks should be ok. I have two Tiger and two Leopard installations on this box. All but one are clean installations, so I think this must be a hardware/firmware issue.

 

[AphoticD]

Have you tried resetting the network devices and identification settings?

Have a skim through this page for which files to delete to reset:
http://osxdaily.com/2012/11/30/resolving-stubborn-wi-fi-connection-problems-in-mac-os-x/

Also, I’m sure you’ve done a great deal of troubleshooting, so I don’t intend to insult you, but have you tried different kinds of cabling, e.g cat5, cat5e, 6, patch, etc? If you put another machine in place of the MDD does it get assigned an IP address over DHCP?

Have you tried a factory reset on the router?

Lastly, if you enable internet sharing from another Mac forwarding IP WiFi->Ethernet then connect this to the MDD on an isolated network I.e direct crossover/patch cable between the two, is it still not configuring?

 

[weckart]

WiFi works fine, so the router and Network settings aren't the issue. The fact that drivers aren't recognised is puzzling as is the cable issue. The cables are fine as the connections are recognised on another Mac.