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Dead Ethernet

By Jeffrey Howard
All rights reserved unless noted otherwise

When I booted to linux, my SMC EtherPower II network interface card worked just fine. When I booted to Windows 98, the card worked correctly. However, whenever I booted to Windows 98 and then soft-rebooted (no loss of power) to linux, the ethernet card failed to function. I'm writing this sufficiently long afterwards to not remember exactly, but I believe there were error messages reported to syslog regarding an MII tranceiver failure.

Platform

I was using RedHat Linux 5.2 in conjunction with Windows 98. I believe, however, that the problem will manifest no matter what the distribution of Linux and most likely with either Windows 95 or 98.

Solution

It turns out that Windows was initializing the card with a process that involved wiping some of the card's on-chip instructions in order to treat it like the lowest common denominator card possible. This is easier on the driver programmers no doubt. In any case, Linux expected the card to be in a state consistent with just being powered on, not mind-wiped by Windows. The solution is really a work-around. Don't soft boot from windows 95 or 98 into linux if you're having this problem.