I have a dual boot openSUSE 12.2 and windows 7 pc that had been running perfectly until a recent upgrade.
The previous system was an AMD 64 X2 6000 cpu and 4gb ddr2 on an ASRock N68C-GS FX motherboard.
I recently upgraded the CPU to an AMD 4100 FX (3600) CPU and 8gb of DDR3 and all of a sudden my openSUSE can no longer see the network wired connection. (not tried wireless yet).
Windows 7 (typically) is all “business as usual” but no linux live disks or the added install of Ubuntu studio can see any wired network connection.
I have read that windows sometimes switches off the network card when closing down and linux can not re-start it, but why this has possibly happened after my upgrade has me lost.
In an attempt to get my openSUSE back I have added a wireless card, disabled the wired network in windows 7 and made it use the wireless connection exclusively. ( I only have windows 7 for a few ganes). Howeveer, openSUSE still can not see a network connection and I can find nothing to tell me how to re-enable the NIC for linux.
Any pushes in the right direction would be greatly appretiated.
Thanks for the replay glistwan, the output from the command you posted is at the bottom, but here is a list of stuff to let you know what I have done in the meantime…
Enabled Wake on LAN in the BIOS (restarted, powered off and disconnected from power).
Disabled the ability for windows to shut down the NIC and put it to sleep (restarted, powered off and disconnected from power).
Reset CMOS
Removed BIOS battery
Re-installed openSUSE
Ran Ubuntu 10.10 live distro
Ran Linux Mint 13 live distro
Ran Microscope diagnostic CD (No network card detected)
All of which still resulted in linux not being able to get an IP address and subsequently not getting on the Internet.
However, every time I boot into Windows 7, everything works. Most frustrating is that I hardly ever use windows these day except to play a few games and now I have to use it for everything. >:(
Every linux distro I run whether installed or live CD fails to get an IP address.
I fail to understand what the problem could be in linux as a live distro should get an IP address without any modifications.
My belief is that windows has switched the NIC off and keeps doing so despite my attempts to tell it not to, with turning off sleep mode and ensuring Wake on LAN is enabled windows should just leave the network card ‘live’ and usable.
I even reset the bios to no avail hoping that might reset the NIC too.
I am completely stummped here and pulling my hair out.
If you turn off the computer and unplug it from the wall for a few minutes, then plug it back in and go straight into Linux, you can check out this theory. I had this happen once and a complete power down followed by running Linux new and not Windows allowed the Ethernet to work. My solution was to use an add-in card known to work with Linux and it was not a chipset by Realtek.
I am not convinced that this is a network card problem. I run a dual booth win 7 opensuse 12.2 system without problems and have been running dual boot for 12 or 13 years and have never seen windows leave a network card inaccessible.
Where does win 7 get its IP address from, is it hard coded or does it get it from a dhcp server. What else has changed? I have had a problem with an intel pcie nic getting upset or upsetting a netgear switch after a restart. this was fixed by rebooting the switch
If you look at one of my above replies you’ll see that I have reset the bios, removed the cmos battery and disconnected from the power in my attempts to reset the NIC, one thing I didn’t say was that during the power down I went and cooked sunday lunch. But thanks for the help.
In Windows 7, the properties for the NIC allow you to enable/disable the ability for the computer to put the card into sleep mode (turn off to save power) and to enable/disable Wake on LAN. In several items I have read during my search the solution was suggested to lie in the enabling of WoL (Wake on LAN) in the BIOS so that windows leaves the NIC active instead of turning it off. So, even though I have WoL enabled in the NIC properties and in the BIOS, Linux (that’s all three distro’s I tried) is unable to use the NIC. During bootup it is possible to see the light on the NIC flicker when the IP address request is sent and subsequent communications, but with Linux this never happens, making me believe that the NIC is disabled somehow.
Well my PC has been off all day, disconnected from the power and the LAN cable unplugged. I booted straight into openSUSE and still no IP address is forthcoming. Not even a flicker from the NIC trafffic light (the NIC power light is on though). Typically though, I booted into Windows 7 and before the desktop appeared the NIC traffic light flickered indicating traffic.
Is there anyone please, who can shove me in the right direction to get this sorted? You will be my saviour. I’ve transfered my thunderbird settings and data across to Windows as I am that desperate now.
I really don’t want to use windows for anything other than games but it seems to have somehow goofed up my network for openSUSE (and any other linux distro for that matter). :’(
>
> Well my PC has been off all day, disconnected from the power and the LAN
> cable unplugged. I booted straight into openSUSE and still no IP address
> is forthcoming. Not even a flicker from the NIC trafffic light (the NIC
> power light is on though). Typically though, I booted into Windows 7 and
> before the desktop appeared the NIC traffic light flickered indicating
> traffic.
>
> Is there anyone please, who can shove me in the right direction to get
> this sorted? You will be my saviour. I’ve transfered my thunderbird
> settings and data across to Windows as I am that desperate now.
> I really don’t want to use windows for anything other than games but it
> seems to have somehow goofed up my network for openSUSE (and any other
> linux distro for that matter). :’(
I have had issues like this with Winxx before. As a test (NOT AS SOP!) I
have temporarily resolved the issue by simply pulling the plug with Windows
running and the card operational. Yeah, risky. All it will do is tell you
if Windows is doing something to the card. Last one like this for me was
also a video card where Windows was setting something that was held in ROM
on the card and I never did get it working with dual boot but at least the
catastrophic power fail test pinpointed the problem.
Hi Will Honea and thanks for replying. Pulling the plug on a running OS no matter what brand has a multitude of potential disasters associated with it, so forgive me if I decline the advice. I have taken the time since my last post to get the wireless network card I installed updated (firmware) and working. I’m happy to say that I can now at least get my openSUSE onto the Internet and my email is up to date. This does not however mean that the issue with my wired connection is forgotten, I really want to know what on earth has happened and I will continue to post my progress in this thread. Thanks again to everyone who has responded so far and please let me know if you get any information that might lead to a solution. Regards to all
Going crazy here trying to work out what the problem might be, but still no closer to understanding.
If I configure Eth0 then the wireless adapter stops connecting and I lose internet connectivity. Disable Eth0 and wifi works.
Disable wifi and Eth0 still won’t pick up a dhcp address, even if I reserve one for it on the router. Set a static address and ifconfig shows it as assigned but pinging beyond the local loop (127.0.0.1) is not possible. I can’t even see the router, which is really confusing me. I set the default gateway and dns to the address of the router (as it is in windows where typically everything works fine), but name resolution fails and pinging anything other than 127.0.0.1 results in “address unreachable”.
This really has me frustrated beyond words now. If any other linux distro didn’t have the same issue then I would use that rather than Windows, but I’m stuck with a flakey and slow wifi connection if I want to continue using openSUSE.
When your network does not work in Linux, you must consider why that might be and what your alternatives might be. If Wireless works when you disable a wired port, then that sounds like a short term solution perhaps. In most cases, the problem is that there is not direct support by the manufacturer for your hardware. For any network setup, you need to know the chipset, make and model of the network device in question, find their web site and see if they provide Linux support or not. If it is yes, they may have their own binary driver you can compile and load. If no, any support is provided by volunteers whose support can be good, but sometimes not. One thing for sure though, it is up to the manufacturer to provide Linux support and if they elect not to, it just falls on you as to what action to take. I can say that in more than one case, I have had to search online to find a Linux comparable network device, buy it and install it myself. It happens and it could happen to you. So you must consider just why your network does not work. And if I have not said so before, do not discount trying a newer kernel version, up to 3.6.6 to see if any new hardware support might exist for you as this is where the drivers live for most devices.
Thanks for the reply Jdmcdaniel3, but as I said in my original post and the title, this system was all working fine until I popped a quad core cpu in and 8 gb of ddr. Booted into windows and ever since no flavour of linux can get an IP address. I even installed an old Netgear FA311 PCI card to see if my onboard was goosed. I can see both the devices Eth0 and Eth1 and I can configure them for DHCP or static IP, but in DHCP no IP address is forthcoming and with the static IP pinging the router gives a host unreachable error.
I am now trying to find out if the new AMD 4100 CPU could have anything to do with it, but it just seems so wierd that I can see the devices and they appear to be fine when configuring them but they get no IP address from the router. Windows as I said earlier works perfectly with every card I’ve used, Eth or Wifi.
The Add-in Netgear card I installed yesterday has just decided to work. All I did was try a static IP then switch back to DHCP and as “Robert is your mothers brother” ifconfig showed a DHCP applied IP address and everything connected.
This is only a temporary solution as the onboard ethernet will still only work with Windows 7, so I will continue to look for answers.
As a side note, when I booted into windows Win7 it failed to find a driver for the Netgear card where linux did. lol!
It looks to me that the card has an IPv6 address, but not an IPv4
address. I would look at the network hardware besides the computer:
network cable, router, switch…
Force an IPv4 without dhcp. Look at the logs when you try to restart the
network.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” (Minas Tirith))
I have a same issue. I have Atheros (Qualcomm) ethernet card.
It works on Windows and it works on Linuxmint that I have on
the same computer. I also worked for a while on opensuse 12.2
but stopped after kernel update. I noticed that they have removed
the original driver - alx - from actual kernels.
Now I don’t know what will the future be. I contacted the driver
devepeloper as well but I didn’t get any feedback.
I have had my linux (openSUSE and Mint) running exclusively on an add-in network card while Win7 was using the onboard one with the add-in disabled. The problem with this configuration is that all flavours of linux could not reboot or shut down the PC, I kept getting a frozen screen with “modem-manager [1080]:<auto> caught signal 15, shutting down…” which appeared to point to a network error although I wasn’t sure what… So, I have disabled the onboard NIC in the bios and I am using the add-in card solely while not booting into Win7 at all and lo and behold linux can now reboot and shut down properly. This makes me believe that something has changed in the onboard network card, not enough that it won’t work in windows, but enough to upset linux. Afterall, it was all working perfectly up until I opened this thread.
I probably won’t need to run windows anyway as thankfully I’ve managed to get Lord of the rings online (the only thing I tend to use Windows for) to work in Mint, but it’s eating away at me not knowing what the problem is.
Reminds me of an issue I ran into years ago when I was still dual-booting (Today I only use VMs to deploy alt OS which I highly recommend to all. Dual booting sucks compared to running machines simultaneously if you can do it).
Highly recommend you inspect the MAC addresses of your NICs whichever OS you are booted into.
Typically the default MAC address is burned into the silicon, so when you go online your network (DHCP in particular) won’t understand that you’re “different.” It’ll see your familiar MAC address and assume that you already know what your IP address is so won’t “issue” you a “new” address. Of course, since you’re in the “other” OS, your system won’t have the IP address cached.
This “issue” is further exacerbated by today’s new network discovery and setup features which again will mis-diagnose your machine as already configured and configured with the “other” OS.
So, if this is what you’re looking at, here are some recommendations…
Change your MAC address. If you’re using Network Manager in openSUSE, this is easy to do nowadays (and finally works). You can use the “clone” function(don’t know why it’s called that, it’s actually spoofing) for the specific network connection’(s) properties so your DHCP will identify you properly as different from “the other OS.”
You can also permanently change your MAC address by specifying in your NIC interfface file.
Force refresh/renew your DHCP session which should cause the DHCP server to re-issue you your IP address. This should but may not always work.
