Hello, I have searched the forums but have had no luck finding an answer.

Question. How do I reinstall a network card driver?

Situation. I have a debian sarge build with a netgear PCI NIC. All was working fine until my house had a power failure. The computer rebooted and everything works except the card. To quickly test the card I booted using a live CD and everything works fine, even the NIC. So I know it is not a hardware issue. When I go back to the hard drive and boot, I get a lot of modprobe errors. "Invalid line 77 in etc/modprobe.conf ALSA" I tried modprobe LNE100TX but only got the "line 77" error.

PCI info shows the NIC. But ifconfig shows only the loopback.

Rebuilding is easy but I would like to save the install and learn how to fix this without reinstalling the OS.

Thanks for any assistance.

Invalid line 77 in etc/modprobe.conf ALSA

... so what does line 77 say?

BTW: have you done a filesystem check on that hard-drive?

Simon- Line 77 reads ALSA portion

76 ### update-modules: start processing etc/modutils/alsa
77 ALSA portion
78 alias char-major-116 snd

Since the power failure, I've noticed that there are about a dozen or so "invalid line 77" errors during boot.
My old SB sound card never worked with any linux distro, while it would be nice if it did work, it is not high on the priorities. The NIC is the priority.

The system during the last reboot did a fsck on the root. But I do not know if that does the whole drive.
I did try the command fsck while in a root terminal but got the warning that "running e2fsck on a mounted system may cause severe file system damage do you want to continue?" so I chose no.

Thanks for the expended brain cells.

You have to unmount any partition you check.
You can also force a filesystem check on boot.

"ALSA portion" looks like a heading not a modprobe.conf instruction ... try commenting it out. If it dosn't work, you can always remove the #.

Goodness knows why a bad reboot would cause this though.

SUCCESS

Well Heck, Go figure it would be something so simple.
Commenting out line 77 has restored the NIC to operational status and has also removed all of the errors during boot. I was cautious about doing this only because the beginning of the file states that it should not be manually edited and that the end of the world will come if it is manually edited. OK so Im embellishing just a bit.

The only thing I have noticed that relates to changing the file is that a comment during shut down comes up on screen saying that modules.conf file is newer than the modules file.

Glad to hear it.

You could get rid of that comment by touch(1)ing the modules file.