Sometimes There’s Just No Logic…
Last Friday I got to work, booted up my little Eee netbook and quickly realized that it wasn’t on the network. No DropBox. No IM. No Web. I love this little thing, but without a network connection it suddenly becomes a weird paperweight.
I toggled the WiFi hotkey and confirmed that it was indeed on. Nothing.
I plugged in an ethernet cable and confirmed I had link lights on both ends and packets moving (flickery lights!). No results.
Took a look into the Device Manager and was dismayed to see a complete absence of my ethernet and wifi adapters! I found that really distressing as everything had been working an hour before when I packed up at the house.
Scan for new hardware? None.
Attempted to reload drivers. No luck. Fail.
Whined on Twitter. No tips.
Whined to some fellow geeks on IM. Nathan replied with something like, “Power down, unplug, pull the battery for 10 seconds. Hit power button to drain any charge, put battery back in and try.”
I booted back up and had my two network adapters back. Damnedest thing… Static electricity maybe?
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Flair and Sparklies
That sounds almost exactly like what my Media Center did over the weekend – the NIC disappeared and it took a hard reset like what you did plus a BIOS flash to get the NIC back, never figured out why. I do know that completly discharging everything the way you described is how to clear out any last vestiges of power-resident memory.
Solar Flare?
I’ve actually had a Windows 2003 Server do that in my VMWare ESXi farm. The only way to get it back was to edit settings on the server and change the network it belonged to into a fake virtual network with no nic’s attached, hit apply, then set it back. It’s done this to me twice now in about 4 months, no idea why.