ECS L7VTA on-board ethernet troubles

[beavis88]

Howdy all. I put together a new system last night based around the ECS L7VTA motherboard, but am having serious difficulties getting the on-board ethernet to work. I generally loathe on-board components, but humor me just this one time.... :)

Win2k pro does not recognize the hardware, so I installed the drivers supplied by ECS. Everything for the install appears to work OK, but the NIC clearly is not working. Further, when I try to disable or uninstall the device (via device mgr), mmc locks up completely.

Now, the manual for the ECS board is utterly useless - it mentions in one paragraph that the NIC is a VT6102, then the next that its a Realtek 8100b. I was under the impression that the VT8235 southbridge had integrated LAN functionality -- however, there are no LAN drivers for that chipset on viaarena. When I let Windows select the driver, it picks a Rhine II (aka VT6102) driver...any ideas which one I should be using here? Any idea where to send hate mail to the ECS manual writers? :)

I'm guessing this may be bad hardware, but was hoping someone might have some insight on how to fix this problem. I could always drop in a PCI NIC, or RMA the board, but would prefer to avoid those options (particularly the latter...)

Thanks in advance for any suggestions y'all might be able to provide.

FWIW, everything else appears to work fine.

Also FWIW, full system specs:

Athlon xp 2200+
(2x) 512 MB PC2100 RAM
Asylum GeForce 4600
Western Digital caviar HD
Creative/Ensoniq AudioPCI sound card

[glc]

1. Is the onboard lan enabled in the bios?

2. Have you installed any Via 4 in 1 drivers?

3. If the answer to both is Yes, either RMA the board or try a PCI lan card.

As an aside, I personally would RMA the board and buy a better brand. There's a reason that board is only $60, and the reason is not that ECS has the ability to build quality components cheaper than anyone else. Your mileage may vary, but the ECS track record is not good.

[beavis88]

Yes, and yes :(

Yeah, I know ECS isn't the highest end manufacturer around, but I don't overclock, and the Asus I paid premium $ for last time was a piece of crap, so I figured I'd roll the dice :)

Some possibly useful further info for anyone else with this board -- the VT8235 apparently includes the VT6103 (aka Tahoe) ethernet controller. If that's the case, no wonder this doesn't work. Via does not appear to have drivers available for this, nor does the ECS-supplied CD.

One thing I'm going to try before throwing in the towel: The ECS CD has 4in1 4.43v -- I just pulled 4.46 from viaarena, so I'll burn that on CD and see if it helps. If it doesn't, I'll accept that I lost my dice roll, and head to the store for a new NIC (hopefully not followed by a new mobo). Thanks for the reply.

[beavis88]

Well I'll be damned. Installed win2k, installed 4.46 4in1 drivers, then installed the VIA Rhine II drivers direct from the CD (vs. using device manager). Everything seems to work fine now...I'll just have to watch for leaky capacitors ;)

[glc]

For future reference, we have had the best dice rolling with AOpen and DFI.