Antisocial Hardware? 94
87C751 asks: "Over the weekend, I happened upon a deal: 10/100 PCI NICs for $1.99. I bought two and installed one in my Linux box. The box came up to POST, and the new NIC started looking for a DHCP server (which I thought was cute, if useless). Once that timed out, boot sequence continued to the message "NTLDR not found"! In an attempt to do a PXE net boot, the new NIC had -rewritten my boot sector!- Granted, a few minutes with a GRUB boot floppy set things right again, but why in the world is J. Random piece of hardware arrogant enough to frob my disc? Has anyone else been bitten by antisocial hardware?"
Antisocial... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Antisocial... (Score:1)
But that hardware at least keeps you doing something other than just sitting in a room and staring at the walls or watching the garbage broadcast on television. I wouldn't have much of a social life with or without the hardware, but the hardware keeps me from going insane.
The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know how your boot sector got trashed, but it wasn't the NIC hardware.
Re:The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector (Score:2)
Kirby
Re:The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector (Score:2)
Are you sure? Because when the BIOS went a-callin for a PXE boot device, something on the network card had to answer with a BOOTP attempt, and my guess is that it is an onboard EPROM. They sell those cards with and without them, and from his description, it sounds like there was one installed.
Unless it was built into an overzealous motherboard BIOS (assumed it could find an NE2000 compatible card?)... but I hi
Re:The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector (Score:2)
Way sure. The chip is a Realtek RTL8139. You can see the data sheet at www.realtek.com.tw
I don't want to post a full url because they are dogmeat slow under best of conditions.
Re:The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector (Score:2)
Re:The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector (Score:1)
Re:The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector (Score:2)
Re:The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector (Score:4, Interesting)
Rus
Re:The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector (Score:2, Interesting)
AFAIK those cards do NOT come with a EPROM slot at all, and the realtek drivers with the cards are first rate.
The only way anything even remotely like what you describe could have happened would be if your winblows OS was subject to something else nasty.
It's windows, I wouldn't put it above doing this being the way that it is (but maybe we should ask those
are you sure your boot sector got trashed? (Score:2)
You should try it with a network sniffer running...or else try it with the network cable disconnected and see if it behaves the same way.
Also if it happens again, check if the boot sector really has changed. I also doubt that the PXE ROM would have an NT boot sector sitting somewhere that it could burn
Yes, I'm quite sure (Score:3, Informative)
I still have another NIC, so I could repeat the experiment. I might, too, just to try to dissect the mechanism at work.
Re:The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector (Score:2)
I'm *not* familiar with the design that appears on the web page, and I *still* could have told the guy that "the NIC ate my boot sector" is definitely the most improbable diagnosis I've ever heard.
No Surprise (Score:2, Offtopic)
With the way that the functionality of hardware and software is being exchanged, I'm not surprised to see this.
On the one hand you have Winmodems using cheapo crippled hardware with software performing functions that used to be in hardware.
On the other hand, you have modern network cards ready to offload TCP/IP processing from the OS and to do DMA.
Re:No Surprise (Score:2)
The interface to most modems is a holdover to a time when they were typically hooked up to dumb terminals (hence the onboard command interpreter), and the signal processing required could not be done at any cost except with dedicated har
OS Specific Hardware! (Score:2, Interesting)
Second to this, for me, is hardware that is marketed by the chipset, as, for me, these have been typically difficult to find drivers for. Related to this
Re:OS Specific Hardware! (Score:1)
The Xerox WC385 I got from work (funny thing that, since my job at the time was with a Linux server appliance company that has since been consumed) was windows only. Absolutely no non-Windows drivers and no support for standard printer protocols.
The Adaptec 7902 has drivers for many OSes, but they have a special hardware RAID mode (RAID 0 or 1 only, but often good enough) that they only support in their Windows driver. A real pain since the product we are
Re:OS Specific Hardware! (Score:1)
(Okay, you can probably run Linux or
Re:OS Specific Hardware! (Score:2)
I can't imagine trying to find a reliable source for replacement parts for a clone 386DX-33 (or slower) so I would hate to ponder the logistics for your MCA box
Re:OS Specific Hardware! (Score:2)
It's got the Realtek 8139 chip, which is probably the most supported Ethernet chip on the planet, which is good since it's on something like 80% of NICs sold. It's well supported under Linux, Win9x drivers are easy to find, and when I put a few of them in some Win2k machines a while back I didn't even have to install them, they just worked without even a "Windows has found new hardware" message or anything.
This is one case where generic is good.
Re:OS Specific Hardware! (Score:2)
After all, if your display drivers defaulted to 1024x768x32-bit color, a lot of older video cards would choke and on
Re:OS Specific Hardware! (Score:1)
Re:OS Specific Hardware! (Score:2)
Yup. (Score:2)
Yup. Two(ish) words:
Win.Modems
NT boot loader (Score:1)
Beware the cheap NIC (Score:5, Funny)
No way to change it either - I guess someone missed the point that MACs are supposed to be unique.
Re:Beware the cheap NIC (Score:1)
And yes, if you have an OS like Linux (probably *BSD, etc) you can tell the driver to change your MAC address. A pain, but possible. My 802.11b+ethernet router comes with a web interface that lets you do the same (they call it "MAC cloning") so that if you have registered your MAC with your ISP (many broadband ISPs bind to your MAC before allowing traffic from your IP) you can change
Re:Beware the cheap NIC (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course there is. It's the IEEE. I know because I shelled out 1600 hard earned dollars for 2^24 MAC numbers. Need their URL?
Re:Beware the cheap NIC (Score:1)
Yes, on your own network, that's great. If, as he would be doing, since he registered the range, you are selling a product, and don't want your customers to get bitten by MAC conflicts, spoofing MAC has absolutely no benefit. It looks like the manufacturer of the dupe cards cut the expense of proper, coordinated mac addresses. In fact, I'd guess that every one of these cards had the same address. If you're selling to the home user who uses his nic
Re:Beware the cheap NIC (Score:2)
Re:Beware the cheap NIC (Score:2, Informative)
IP adresses exist so that you can abstract away the hardware on the network. For example, let's say you have a Linux box with IP of 192.168.1.1 and MAC address of XXXX. You can take that box out, and replace it with a Win2k box of IP 192.168.1.1 and MAC address of YYYY. Anything that needed to talk to 192.168.1.1, can still do so without worring ab
Re:Beware the cheap NIC (Score:1)
Re:Beware the cheap NIC (Score:2)
Re:Beware the cheap NIC (Score:2)
I've seen this three times. Twice with some no-name tulip clones and once with a couple of really old Macs with built-in ethernet.
If you keep the machines on separate subnets, you'll never know about it (unless you record MAC addresses). However, once you put them on the same subnet, mighty strange things start hapenning - one machine works while the other doesn't - seemingly random intermittent behaviou
Re:Beware the cheap NIC (Score:2)
I think it may have been a marker, to indicate where the MAC should go in the actual production run, but whoever made the cards skipped that step.
Now that I think about it, there is another part to the story.
There was a dos utility that came with them that claimed to do diagnostics, and let you change the MAC address. When
es1370 (Score:5, Interesting)
I bought an es1370 PCI sound card for $20 to replace my ISA one. Works great in Linux, but the Windows drivers cleared the boot sector and erased my BIOS. Is this a new trend for hardware? ;-)
This sucks because my VIA based motherboard has a bug which causes lockups during heavy DMA activity when a ISA sound card is installed. If you have the Linux kernel source, look in Documentation/ sound/ VIA-chipset for more info about this problem.
Took me a while to figure it out. At first I thought it was a problem with a new hard drive--stress testing it would lock up the machine. Once I figured it out, it was obvious. I tested the situtation thoroughly. With ISA sound, lockups, without, no lockups. Who would've thought a sound card can cause problems with your hard drive?
Re:es1370 (Score:2)
another story (Score:2)
It also messed up that entire IDE channel. The DVD drive on the slave setting was messed up. The BIOS detected it with a garbled name.
After taking that bay
promise ide cards (Score:1)
caused so many problems that i eventually just removed the card and reinstalled my os
i made sure that my newest mb had the multiple channels for raid built in
Evil Memory (Score:5, Funny)
Anybody want some cheap RAM?
Re:Evil Memory (Score:5, Funny)
Hello?! Those don't go in your PCI slots!
Re:Evil Memory (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Evil Memory (Score:2, Funny)
I can beat that (Score:2)
Re:Evil Memory (Score:2)
Re:Evil Memory (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Evil Memory (Score:2)
fortunately, they were all mca bus motherboards (ps/2 systems), so no big loss
Re:Evil Memory (Score:1)
Re:Evil Memory (Score:1)
my brother needs some "upgrades", i promise i'll give it back when i'm done
Re:Evil Memory (Score:1)
Re:Evil Memory (Score:1)
$1.99 each? (Score:1)
Re:$1.99 each? (Score:1)
Power supplies (Score:5, Interesting)
My (now) wife's computer was toasting everything over a period of years. It didn't stop until I replaced the case, and thus the power supply in passing.
Nobody ever seems to suspect the power supply if the computer is running, but I suspect that ill-formed power can toast modern electronics.
ARGH! (Score:4, Funny)
GRUB, NIC, SIB, USA, NOB, FSCK,
Will someone please think of the children!
Jumping to Conclusions (Score:5, Insightful)
Once that timed out, boot sequence continued to the message "NTLDR not found"! In an attempt to do a PXE net boot, the new NIC had -rewritten my boot sector!-
And you know this how, exactly? Did you try rebooting the machine with the card removed? I had a similar problem with an Intel NIC that wanted to netboot, but fixing the problem was a simple matter of telling the card not to netboot in its BIOS setup. Obviously it wouldn't be impossible for a NIC to rewrite your boot sector (since it's running unrestricted code when the system BIOS initializes it) but it's extremely unlikely.
Why do you bother spewing nonsense? (Score:1, Troll)
Obviously you didn't even bother to read a few posts before yours...
The NIC can't run anything. There's no flash or EPROM on it. There's no way for it to force the CPU to execute code. I't can't do a damn thing but perform I/O instructions.
Perhaps you're confusing a piece of hardware with driver software.
Re:Why do you bother spewing nonsense? (Score:2)
Re:Why do you bother spewing nonsense? (Score:1, Redundant)
Re:Why do you bother spewing nonsense? (Score:3, Informative)
The NIC can't run anything. There's no flash or EPROM on it. There's no way for it to force the CPU to execute code. I't can't do a damn thing but perform I/O instructions.
Let's read up [yale.edu] on PC hardware initialization, shall we?
Re:Why do you bother spewing nonsense? (Score:1, Offtopic)
I've spent the last 25 fsking years designing controllers and adapter cards. I designed a NIC for a fsking PCjr.
I had a PDF of that NIC's controller chip data sheet on my hard drive for over a year. I know it and I know there's no frickin way *THAT* adapter can force the CPU to run code. I'm not saying other adapters can't. They can only if they are designed to.
Re:Why do you bother spewing nonsense? (Score:1)
Are you sure... (Score:2)
Back in my younger, unwiser days, I kept wondering why NT 4.0 wouldn't start after I installed the driver (and had to reboot). I drove myself crazy trying to figure out what NTLDR too.
Don't worry. It happens to the best of us.
Re:Are you sure... (Score:2)
This sounds vaguely familiar. I went apeshit nuts for the better part of a morning trying to figure out why a SuSe 8.1 P3 450 in the lab was trying to execute NTLDR (and failing)... until I remembered the driver diskette for the framebuffer in the damn floppy drive. D'OH!
Microsoft OSs: productivity killers even if you don't run them.
But, of course, this doesn't solve the reported re
X-Cable (Score:5, Funny)
The cable has 'changed' internally but no one could tell until one tries to plug it into a live computer - and gets the same shocking experience I had. I didn't throw it away, but mark it with 'X' instead. It becomes 'X-Cable' as in 'X-Men' - it's now possessing super-power after the disaster.
Spare parallel cable? Sure!
Re:X-Cable (Score:1)
In north america, the neutral and ground wires are connected at some point in the circuit anyway.
To my understanding, this is to provide a refrence point for the hot wires, so each are 120v from ground, as opposed to 120v from the neutral wire.
In a properly wired circuit, there should be no current flow between a neutral wire, and a ground wire.
Hostile CD-ROM (Score:1)
Well, since I'm doing some kind of family/friend IS/IT support, [slashdot.org] people turns to me when they want to get rid of their now nearly useless stuff.
So I got this good-looking 8X IDE CD-ROM, which did really stange things on every machine I did try it, whith every possible jumpers settings.
Eventually, I went googling, to find out with the model ID that this beast, even if it had and very-IDE-looking interface, was actually talking MKE, not IDE.
Anybody has a cheap MKE controller around ?
Re:Hostile CD-ROM (Score:2)
Re:Hostile CD-ROM (Score:1)
Now that you say that it's true, I've got that old ESS ISA sound card with all those stange interface.
No, really, thank you, I did figure out that MKE was some Panasonic proprietary shmucky, but I did not link that to those old CD farts !
Re:Hostile CD-ROM (Score:1)
Evil power supply (Score:2)
Antisocial Software... (Score:1)
My NIC destroys my pci slots (Score:1)
After sticking it into a couple of slots in both my spare computer and everyday desktop with the
TV special (Score:4, Funny)
"WHEN GOOD MEMORY GOES BAD"
"World's scariest hardware installs!"
"Who wants to install a million NICs?"
"American CPU idle"
"Overclocking Island"
"The weakest SCSI device"
and of course, their obligatory sequals, and finally:
"The Torvalds'" ("TOVE!!!!!!!!!!!!")
I love Macs, but... (Score:2)
Same with the first few revisions of the iMac before they designed in the easy-access trap door, but the machines above were worse-- I never worked under the hood of one of them without bleeding.
~Philly
Just last night! (Score:2)
Into the garbage with that power supply. New power supply in, pc works great. New parts not fried (luckily). My jaw not broken (luckily).
Not the manufacturese fault... (Score:1)
i was doing something that required that i remove the wires from it, noting their postion on the switch with a color coded diagram...
somewhere after unplugging the switch and before pluging it back in (about ten minutes later) the diagram i made got rotated by 90 degrees.
I hooked the switch back up and turned it on... bam, all the light in the house go off. I think I heared myself say a
PXE code is in BIOS, not on NIC (Score:2)
Case that maims (not kills) motherboards. (Score:2)