Network card nor onboard NIC working

[mark]

The network card/s on a PC we had from Music Village is playing up.

The onboard card is reporting no or poor connection when the lead plugged into it and the socket they plug into work fine for a neighbouring PC.

I tried a seperate NIC and that's the same. I tried another, completely different NIC and that's the same too.

The motherboard is an ASROCK and the onboard is a Realtek. WinXP SP2.

I tried a knoppix live CD but don't know enough about linux to see what's happening with the NICs - just that there was no connection with it either.

I was thinking spyware/ virus until the knoppix test - but I could be wrong with that.

This particular PC has always been problematic [just joined it to the network in the summer]. But i'd attributed it to the very cheap network cable the music dept had attached to it. It always worked - albeit slowly. But now it doesn't want to know.

I've only tried the one PCI slot - if it could be that both that and the onboard are fried.

[mac_shinobi]

Test the PCI NIC on another machine to make sure that it is ok ( making sure to disable the onboard NIC in the bios and install the latest drivers for the PCI NIC ).

If that works fine, then try the same on the asrock mobo with regards to disable onboard and install latest drivers for it, if it still doesnt work on the asrock then try a different pci slot.

Also have you got the latest drivers for the asrock motherboard installed ?

If still no luck then maybe a bios update as a last resort ?

Silly Question, but have you tried a net cable?

[wesleyw]

That error comes up if you haven't reached the dns server or dhcp

try a laptop in that net point and a new cable as suggested above!

Wes

[mark]

Thanks for all those suggestions Gecko. The new NIC did work on another PC.

Tried several network cables which all worked on the neighbouring PC, and in different sockets [soory - I wasn't clear about that]

Visited the PC this morning and it was connecting fine! Noticed the cheapo lead next to it was unpluged - plugged it in and the old error re-appeared.

On closer inspection it looks like the cheapo lead is wired wrongly - there are only 4 wires, and the brown is off to the middle one.

Snip - bin!