Dual Boot NIC problem
 

Hi all,

Hopefully someone will be able to help as im getting desperate now.
I had a XP pro installation working perfectly and decided to dual boot with RH9.0 using grub. Took ages to work out how to install a driver for my NIC card Broadcom 440x but eventually managed and everythings working fine, i even managed to set up my samba shares.... Not bad for a couple of hours on redhat i hear you say. Problem is now when i boot back into XP the NIC card is showing its working ok but i cant connect to the network the NIC "seems" dead . Ive tried uninstalling and reinstalling the device, manually configuring my ip no matter what i try it will not connect and the card stays dead........boot back into redhat and viola...logged on no problem. Ive google until i can google no more and have found quite a few people with the same problem albiet different NICs and OS's [SUSE]. I get the feeling that this must be a fairly coomon occurance and would greatly appreciate any guidance from the experts.

Thanks for your time
PC1962:newbie:

This is not a personal attack on you, but the description of your problem doesn't even seem logical. How would configuring your NIC in one OS cause it to fail to operate properly in another OS? When you reboot your machine, the hardware should forget about all previous OS-level instructions and come up cleanly.

I would think this _has_ to be a coincidence, and that something else has happened. Think about what new software you may have installed on the Windows side of things (updates, new applications, etc.). Look in your Device Manager to make sure the card is being detected properly.

I just can't think of any reason why using the NIC in Linux would cause it to fail to work in Windows.

Hi Mad- no offence taken but it would seem we all have a lot to learn about Linux and its many strange traits! If you were to search in this forum and probably on many others. there are many references to this problem but none that seem to come to a satifactory conclusion. However, I did find a little snippit of info and the result should convince you that this indeed is a linux problem. I have a recent copy of Knoppix live. I booted into knoppix made sure that it recognised my NIC, rebooted into windows and viola NIC working again. Perhaps the redhat driver alters the firmware of the NIC's chipset somehow preventing the windows driver from activating it? Who knows but i havent rebooted into redhat again and to tell you the truth, I'm not sure Linux is ready for me or im not ready for linux. Perhaps when the GUI compares to windows for functionality i may consider Linux again.

Thanks......back to windoze then!
pc1962

I am having the exact same problem as described above with my WindowsXP/Redhat 9 dual boot machine- PLEASE, if someone has a solution or can suggest anything to try, let me know. I installed the driver for Broadcom 440x in Windows xp and everything works fine. Then I istalled the driver in Redhat 9.0 and everything works fine... then I boot up windows and the everything looks fine but it just doesn work... any suggestions???

R.

Perhaps you should try Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE, MEPIS or Mandriva. Red Hat 9 is really old and unsupported now. There is no reason why Linux shouldn't work for you other than that it has a learning curve (like anyother thing imaginable). If you an average user (surfing, music, word/text processing), Linux has all those tools (and I mean a plethora). Into servers and networking? Linux has tools not found anywhere else.

Perhaps you can try the distros mentioned above and you'll change your mind.

Tux,

... I solved this problem by downloading and installing the driver from the broadcom site... the driver that came with the computer didn't work, but the most recent version from the site did the trick.