T43 running XP Pro can't see ethernet card -help!

[titianmom]

I have a *new* T43 with an ethernet nic and wireless nic installed. The person who sold me the machine is a good guy and said he used the ethernet to install the OS, so it worked for him.

Anyway, we have a wireless connection at home, so I set up the wireless on it. Never messed with the ethernet, or so I thought.

The laptop is at a hotel and my husband just called to say he tried the ethernet and can't connect. The laptop does not see the card at all under Device manager. The green light is on so it has power. He tried an ipconfig -all and there was nothing; He says he see 2 wireless cards, not one.

Any suggestions?? Could it be that I relabeled the ethernet as wireless by accident or something setting up the wireless connection (weird, but maybe I screwed something up.)

Kim

[Harryc]

Well, there's no way the machine has (2) wireless cards, so one of those wireless entries is Ethernet. I would go into device manager and delete the entry that is incorrect and then reinstall the Ethernet driver. The question is which one is incorrect, and is this a factory install of XP from the recovery partition? If so, the ethernet driver installation executable resides in a subfolder of C:\Drivers on your C drive. If not, you'll have to download it from Lenovo.com...difficult with no Internet connection. To answer your question, yes you could have easily done something to the Ethernet connection during the WiFI configuration.

Here's the driver at Lenovo -
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-58618

[titianmom]

Hi,
Thanks for the quick response. I don't run XP Pro on my laptop, I run Linux. I went to my daughter's laptop 'cuz she has XP Pro and I would have had to disable the ethernet literally I would think and I don't think I did that.

Now my husband is telling me that it isn't 2 wirelesss cards he's seeing. He went into Bios and tried to do something with it and he got a " Failed to install network adapter: See winbom."

I have no idea what winbom is.

I have a bunch of Linux live CDs laying around here at home but the husband didn't take them with him,, but that's a good idea (checking the HW)

Can you tell me what winbom is? I'm only finding that it has something to do with the winbom.ini file whatever that is. I'm not an MS person at all. I know Unix/Linux, sorry.

Thanks,
Kim

[Harryc]

Tell him to try disabling the wifi adapter in BIOS and/or via the FN-F5 switch. Then reboot. (This is a shot in the dark based on the below thread)

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T61-and-pri ... /m-p/34161

[titianmom]

Hmm...kinda afraid to disable anything at this point cuz that's the only way he can connect out of the hotel right now. He plans to use it in the lobby tomorrow and try to get some ans that way. He actually knows more about MS than I do and works with networks at work.

I was just a poor little ole' Unix sysadm. (And I plan to stick with Linux, too, thank you very much...)

I'll pass on your suggestion and copy and paste the other post for his amusement, then if he kills his machine it won't be my fault. He may opt to bring it home at the end of the week and just use the Live CDs to make sure it isn't a hardware issue first before he starts monkeying with it.

What's winbom?? Looks like something MS cooked up so that drivers could be automatically updated over the internet unbeknownst to the user as he/she blindly surfs the net, and the winbom.ini keeps track of the hardware/software on the machine (a file) so that these automated updates can take place? Am I at least in the ballpark?

THanks,
Kim

[Harryc]

(WinBOM.ini) drives Sysprep, providing a scriptable OS customization environment. The WinBOM.ini file is used to apply per-machine settings like identity information, machine name, and ISP information during an unattended OS install. If you (or the 'good guy') recently did a factory restore, Sysprep was run to customize the install. If the factory CD's or partition is/were corrupt, that might explain the current difficulties.

[jimmy274]

Not sure if this would help, but my ethernet adapter is almost always turned off by Lenovo Access Connections. I even think that Access Connections shuts the eth port down in it's default configuration, but on battery power only - when I plug in the AC, I always get "Network connection unavailable" pop-up for ethernet connection from taskbar - this is when it's turned on...
So basically, my ethernet port is set to be functional only on AC power, which is the default configuration for Access Conections. I never use it anyway.

[Beaver]

AC are not available in Linux anyway...

For the problem - please try to verify if the Linux can see the card(s). Use the command lspci.