3com NIC can't find DHCP

[yukster]

I have an Asus A7N8X-Deluxe, which has Nvidia and 3com NICs on the board. I'd been having freeze up troubles, but they've gone away since disabling the Nvidia NIC. Unfortunately, the 3com NIC is stubbornly refusing to talk to my gigafast router.

The NIC drivers are installed just fine and windows says it is connected at 100 mbps. I can ping myself but not the router. Ipconfig /all shows the following:

host name: saturn
primary dns suffix:
node type: broadcast
ip routing enabled: no
wins proxy enabled: no
connection-specific suffix:
description: 3com3c920b-emb...
physical address: 00-e0...
dhcp enabled: yes
autoconfiguration enabled: yes
ip address: 169.254.43.38
subnet mask: 255.255.0.0
default gateway:
dns servers:

I have reinstalled the NIC drivers and TCP/IP several times. The router was communicating with the Nvidia NIC just fine and I have two other computers communicating with the router just fine. I read about how the 169 address is auto-assigned by windows when DHCP isn't available. I did the registry hack to disable the auto-assignment, but it still couldn't find the DHCP server. When I do ipconfig /renew it comes back with "DHCP server unreachable."

Anyone have any idea what I'm doing wrong? (BTW, 3com tech support said they don't support embedded 3com NICs, Gigafast said it's not a problem with their router and the Asus tech support guy didn't know anything about networking... his supervisor is supposed to call me back.)

 

[kshugart]

Yukster

you never mentioned what IRQ the NIC was using?

Is it IRQ conflicts?

Is the Nvidia NIC on the mothereboard? if it is you need to disable it.

Since you have an IP address, why are you trying to connect DHCP? Where's the gateway address?

What happens when you remove the static IP address? Klon Shugart
Data Recovery Specialist
Microsoft Certified/ mcp 2000

http://www.adv-data.com

 

[yukster]

Well, I've given up on this approach to solving my freeze-up problems with this board; it froze up with only the 3com NIC enabled. I RMA'ed the board... hope that the problem really is the hardware.

As far as your questions go (cuz I never did figure out why the 3com didn't work... both the Nvidia and the 3com NICs are on the board. Yes, I disabled the Nvidia NIC. I didn't "have" a static IP, I tried picking an IP address within the range that my router was set to. I didn't expect that to work, but someone had suggested it. I didn't check the IRQs while trying the 3com, but previously they had tended to pile up around 20... however, windows never reported any conflicts, just sharing.

The board's off to the factory now, but I'd stil be curious to hear why a NIC wouldn't be able to pull a DHCP address when the network, cables, and everything are working fine otherwise.