[matthewkol186]

Hi everyone!

I'm running a computer on Windows 7 Professional. Not sure exactly what is important, but I do have the ASUS M5A97 motherboard. I'm connected by way of ethernet cable, which has worked perfectly fine up until now.

I power on, the ethernet port glows orange just like usual (I don't know if I should describe specifically the glow), and then right before Windows hits the logon screen, the port stops glowing and the SP/DIF out port begins to glow red, but that probably doesn't matter. No matter what I do, the ethernet cable just won't do anything and I can't connect. Now I'm just left scratching my head, wondering what went wrong. Is it a hardware or software issue? I'm so confused!

[Squashman]

Have you looked in Device Manager for any warning symbols?

[matthewkol186]

Well, indeed there are! I pressed "troubleshoot" on my PC, and, as it would have it, apparently I have a botched driver for Realtek PCI GBE Family Controller, whatever that is. I tried to fix it but it said it could not be fixed. There was also some stuff about "trouble with PnP devices" or something. That sounds relevant - what do I do now?

[DoubleHelix]

You have to download and install all hardware drivers for your computer. Start with the motherboard chipset drivers, and then move on to the other components.

This is part of building your own system.

[matthewkol186]

Alright! Thanks for the help! I'm just a bit confused as to why this would randomly happen when it was working fine before. I hadn't gotten a driver for a hard drive I was connected to by USB, so I fixed that, but I still can't install this driver. What do I do?

[Frank4d]

Go to the ASUS website and download & install the chipset driver first, then do the same for the Realtek LAN driver.

[TerryNet]

I'm just a bit confused as to why this would randomly happen when it was working fine before.

Either some--probably unexplainable--problem happened with the driver, or else the NIC has failed. My guess is NIC failure, but it's best to assume driver and first try to fix that.