Vista Beta disabled my network adapter -- under XP!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Michael A. Covington
  • Start date Start date
M

Michael A. Covington

ASUS P4PE motherboard with Broadcomm Ethernet adapter on the motherboard.
Windows XP Pro. Installed Vista Beta on another partition of the hard disk
and let the boot menu choose between them.

The Ethernet adapter works find under Vista, but when I reboot (with or
without power-cycling) and go into XP, it reports "network cable unplugged"
and the LED next to the Ethernet jack does not light.

In desperation, I grabbed a D-Link PCI-bus Ethernet card from another
computer and installed it. The act of installing it seems to have revived
*both* Ethernet adapters, at least under XP. Since doing that, I haven't
booted Vista.

Any ideas? How on earth does Vista manage to disrupt hardware so it can't
be used by the other OS?

Under XP, I am using ASUS's latest Broadcomm driver, which dates from 2002.
I have no idea what driver Vista is using; perhaps one that is radically
different. Is there any news about Broadcomm drivers in some place I
haven't looked? Would whatever driver Vista uses also work under XP?
 
I had a similar problem. I saw that the connection was not showing up in the
device manager. For whatever reason, the ethernet adaptor was disabled in
BIOS. Once I enabled it, everything seems to be OK.

FYI, I keep switching between XP and Vista partitions through Partition Magic.
 
That's not my situation... it shows up in Device Manager and claims to be OK
except that it says (falsely) that its cable is disconnected.

I've just found a much newer driver available from Broadcom directly
(instead of ASUS) and have installed it. We'll see what happens.
 
Michael A. Covington said:
ASUS P4PE motherboard with Broadcom Ethernet adapter on the motherboard.
Windows XP Pro. Installed Vista Beta on another partition of the hard
disk and let the boot menu choose between them.

The Ethernet adapter works find under Vista, but when I reboot (with or
without power-cycling) and go into XP, it reports "network cable
unplugged" and the LED next to the Ethernet jack does not light.
Click to expand...

When the problem was present, the driver versions for the Broadcom were:
Windows XP: 3.48.0.0
Windows Vista: 4.42.0.0

By going to Broadcom directly I was able to obtain a much newer Windows XP
driver numbered 4.37.0.0. Installing it apparently cured the problem.

I am guessing the higher-numbered driver (under Vista) was leaving the
hardware configuration in a state that the lower-numbered driver (under XP)
did not understand. Bringing them up to nearly the same version seems to
have fixed the problem.
 
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